How to replatform applications

What is replatforming?

Replatforming is a cloud migration strategy that enables organizations to move their applications, often partially, from one computing environment to another. Unlike a full rebuild or rehosting, replatforming focuses on making selective enhancements, often infrastructure-level, without altering core application functionality. The goal is usually to improve security, consolidate application infrastructure, simplify the addition of new features, and create a more efficient foundation for future development.

Why do organizations choose to replatform?

Many organizations reach the need to replatform as they face growing challenges in maintaining performance and managing complexity across legacy, hybrid, and fragmented cloud environments. In many cases, this complexity is self-created by practical realities:

• Decentralized cloud adoption: Individual teams often had full autonomy in choosing their cloud solutions, focusing narrowly on their own applications. While this accelerated initial deployment, it led to inconsistent architectures and duplicated efforts across the business.
• Mergers and acquisitions: Business expansion through M&A adds another layer of complexity. Newly integrated applications often run on different architectures and cloud providers, making consolidation and consistent management difficult.
• Partial cloud adoption: Many companies began their cloud journey with basic rehosting such as lifting applications into the cloud without rearchitecting them for cloud-native performance, scalability, or resilience. This limits the value of cloud investment and leaves operational gaps.

Beyond these structural factors, infrastructure costs continue to balloon as applications scale across multiple clouds. Traditional data center strategies and piecemeal cloud adoption have led to bloated, fragmented ecosystems.

Security pressures may be mounting as well. Businesses typically follow one of two difficult paths: building native security controls within each public cloud, which requires teams to navigate inconsistent policies, UIs, and APIs; or applying third-party security overlays, which often increase operational overhead and create visibility gaps.

Performance and content delivery demands are equally taxing. Teams are forced to manage multiple tools and specialized workflows for media optimization, content pipelines, and multi-device delivery. Developers spend more time troubleshooting latency and platform constraints than innovating.

As these challenges converge, replatforming can become an enabler of growth. It helps businesses streamline their environments, reduce operational sprawl, and regain control in multi-cloud and hybrid architectures — all while positioning teams to support future innovation with greater agility and confidence.

How replatforming works

Replatforming is a structured process that begins well before any infrastructure changes take place.

Assessment of current applications

Before any replatforming decision is made, organizations must evaluate their existing applications. This includes understanding the architecture, dependencies, and infrastructure footprint of each application. Without this visibility, teams risk migrating incompatible services or missing key performance bottlenecks that could carry over into the new environment.

Important areas to assess include:

• Platform compatibility: Can the current application components run reliably on the target platform (e.g., Kubernetes, serverless, containers)? Are there dependencies on proprietary services or hardware that limit flexibility?
• Scalability limitations: Are there architectural constraints that prevent the application from scaling horizontally? Can workloads be distributed efficiently across clouds or regions?
• Performance and latency: Which components are sensitive to latency or throughput issues? Are there optimization opportunities for image delivery, video rendering, or caching?
• Security and compliance: What cloud-native security controls are currently in place, and how portable are they? Are there risks in reapplying these policies across environments?
• Operational overhead: How many tools and manual processes are required to maintain and monitor the application in its current state?

This assessment is also an opportunity to prioritize which applications are strong candidates for replatforming. Not every application needs to be replatformed, as some may be better suited for a full refactor or simple lift-and-shift (rehosting). The goal is to identify where replatforming offers the most value in terms of cost reduction, performance gains, and operational simplification.

By thoroughly evaluating platform compatibility and scalability early in the process, organizations can avoid costly surprises during application migration. This planning phase ensures that the migration path is based on real-world constraints and business priorities and not just theoretical architecture diagrams.

Improving the existing stack — not replacing it

Replatforming is not about choosing a brand-new platform and abandoning what works. Most enterprises do not start with a clean slate. Instead, they take an incremental approach: improving their existing stack to enhance scalability, resilience, and performance, while gradually introducing platform-as-a-service (PaaS) capabilities to complement their current infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) strategies.

PaaS acts as an accelerator, not a replacement. By layering PaaS solutions on top of existing environments, businesses can unlock cloud-native benefits — such as automated scaling, managed services, and faster deployment — without the disruption of full re-architecture. This approach allows teams to modernize critical components while keeping core systems stable.

When introducing PaaS into the existing stack, several key factors help ensure success:

• Scalability and elasticity: Adopt solutions that integrate smoothly with your current architecture and offer horizontal scaling, auto-provisioning, and the ability to absorb traffic spikes seamlessly.
• Cloud-native services: Look for managed databases, serverless compute, and integrated content delivery to reduce operational complexity and speed up development cycles.
• Ecosystem and support: Ensure compatibility with your existing DevOps tools and CI/CD pipelines, and choose providers with strong documentation, community support, and enterprise-grade service commitments.
• Compliance and data sovereignty: Select services that meet regulatory standards for data privacy, regional hosting, and compliance, keeping governance aligned as you scale.
• Transparent pricing models: Prioritize platforms with predictable, usage-based pricing to maintain cost control over time.

Most enterprises continue to rely on hybrid or multi-cloud strategies to balance performance, cost optimization, and risk management. Incremental replatforming fits this reality — enabling organizations to enhance reliability and agility without locking themselves into a single vendor or architecture.

Updating applications for compatibility

With the destination defined, development teams must prepare applications to run effectively in the new environment. This often requires technical adjustments to ensure platform compatibility and optimize for performance.

Key steps to ensure a smooth transition include:

• Code and dependency updates: Refactor hard-coded configurations, replace deprecated libraries, and remove monolithic constraints that hinder portability.
• Database migration: Choose appropriate strategies — such as replication, backup-and-restore, or live migration — to preserve data integrity while moving between environments.
• API compatibility: Evaluate external and internal API dependencies to ensure version alignment and avoid breaking changes during or after migration.
• Containerization: For many workloads, containerizing application components enables portability and smoother orchestration across environments.
• Configuration as code: Manage infrastructure and service configuration declaratively, reducing the risk of drift.

These updates should be iterative and tested early in staging environments that closely mirror production, allowing teams to resolve issues before full-scale deployment.

Migration and validation

The final stage of replatforming focuses on migrating the application and validating its performance, stability, and integrity in the new environment. This is where thorough application migration planning and well-defined migration strategies prove their value. During the migration itself, preserving data integrity is important, especially for systems that involve real-time transactions or distributed databases.

To do this, organizations often use cryptographic hashes or checksums to verify that data remains unchanged during transfer. Encryption ensures data confidentiality and integrity in transit, while digital signatures may be used to detect tampering or provide traceability. Post-migration, integrity is validated by comparing hash values, running consistency checks, or using database-native tools to confirm that all data has been accurately replicated.

Downtime should be minimized through techniques like blue-green deployments, canary releases, or traffic mirroring, which allow teams to validate application behavior without a full cutover:

• In a blue-green deployment, two identical environments (blue and green) are used so traffic can be switched between them with minimal disruption.
• Canary releases gradually roll out changes to a small subset of users to monitor for issues before scaling up.
• Traffic mirroring sends a copy of live production traffic to a staging environment, enabling real-time testing without impacting end users.

Once the application is live, the focus shifts to validation. Functional testing ensures that core logic, workflows, and user experiences operate as intended. Performance testing compares the replatformed application to its previous state to check for improvements or spot any slowdowns, errors, or issues with speed and reliability. Security validation confirms that access controls, monitoring tools, and security policies have been accurately re-applied across the new stack. Additionally, observability is essential: metrics, logs, and traces must be in place to provide visibility into runtime behavior and identify issues early.

Ultimately, successful validation confirms the application runs but also ensures it runs better, more securely, and is positioned to scale and evolve with future development needs.

How Cloudflare supports application modernization

Cloudflare supports replatforming by extending existing stacks with optimized content delivery, localized data storage, dynamic traffic steering, and unified Zero Trust security. Stop GenAI threats, malicious components, and API attacks while gaining visibility for compliance. With serverless compute and edge caching, Cloudflare helps modernize applications incrementally, improving scalability, performance, and control across multi-cloud and hybrid environments.

Learn more about application modernization.