There are a variety of workloads in need of getting appropriately modernized and migrated to powerful environments (clouds) to be readily found, bound, and used by worldwide users for producing business-critical applications. Workloads typically represent software applications, middleware, platforms, and so on. In the past, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) was an enabler of software modernization through integration and composition. In the recent past, MSA is being touted as the best-in-class approach for modernizing legacy, monolithic, and massive applications. Applications are being fragmented accordingly in order to be easily manageable. The development, deployment, and management complexities are expected to go down with complex applications being expressed and exposed as a collection of interoperable, portable, and composable microservices. This means that application modules are being refactored and readied to be loosely or lightly coupled, even decoupled. Further, applications are recommended to be stateless to be scalable and independently deployable.

Some applications can take a "lift and shift" path to the cloud. This means that if some code modifications are brought in, they can be significantly refactored to take the distinct advantages of cloud centers. The applications are being redesigned, recoded, and repurposed for the specific cloud platform. This gives the legacy application a new life and a new purpose.

Containers are the highly optimized and organized runtime for hosting and delivering microservices. Containers in conjunction with microservices are emerging as the most crucial combination for the IT world in many respects. The use of containers to "wrap" or containerize existing legacy applications comes with a few advantages. The containers take care of the underlying platforms and infrastructures and the complexities associated with them. Containerized applications are portable and enhances the speed in which legacy modernization is performed. The cloud migration is smoothened through the utilization of containers. Additional capabilities such as security, web and service enablement, and governance can be attached to containerized applications easily and quickly. Further, modernized legacy applications are a better fit for distributed computing.

A great way to modernize the current and conventional applications as we move them to the cloud is to leverage technologies such as Kubernetes and Mesos instead of building all of the Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs), such as scalability, security, and sustainability.