Weather Looks Different When You're in the Cloud: A Modernization Success Story

Migrating legacy applications to a cloud platform not only offers challenges, but also opportunities to address concurrent modernization issues. Unisys launched the Unisys Weather solution in 1986. Although the solution featured top-quality data, there were two major problems. First, the solution was built for scientists with weather expertise. Its crowded interface with static images resulted in frustrated and confused users. Second, the solution was built in code on servers, and after three decades, the code became so complex that attempting to improve the solution brought fear of breaking it. Additionally, the legacy code recycled for the web wasn’t leveraging modern web browser capabilities. Unisys confronted these issues by moving to a streamlined AWS cloud environment, replacing the long complicated code. As opposed to being locked into finite computing and storage, the flexibility and scalability the cloud provides is paramount for constantly changing weather. The cloud is the only effective option to process exponentially increasing weather data from new satellites and sensors, faster radar scans, and higher resolution models. Network and system administrators, software engineers and meteorologists became AWS certified. Rather than spending their time on operating systems and maintenance, they could now concentrate on constantly improving the solution. In five short Agile DevOps sprints, the cloud-empowered team transformed the cluttered images of the server-driven solution into a dashboard of user-friendly reporting options with extensive filters and drill-down capabilities.