vFunction provided full dynamic and static code analysis of 10 million line Gemini application in 10 days
PALO ALTO, Calif., April 25, 2023 — vFunction, the application modernisation platform, announced today that Correla, one of the largest UK-based product development and managed service providers serving the energy market, has selected vFunction and Wipro to modernise their suite of Gemini online applications.
Correla builds and runs software products that support the UK energy industry’s mission-critical processes and platforms, like National Grid. Gemini is a suite of online applications that manage the transportation of natural gas in the UK. Wipro provides technology services and consulting for Correla and is a Global System Integrator partner for vFunction.
“We engaged vFunction and Wipro to reduce risk, accelerate the modernisation of the Gemini Entry application, and identify a modernisation plan to transform Gemini into a set of microservices,” said Steve Butler, Correla Technical Services Manager. “In addition, modernisation reduces the cost of running the application, which helps keep gas prices down for the general public.”
The Gemini code base consists of over ten million lines of Java code. Manually analysing the architecture of the Gemini application proved extremely complex using conventional tools. Correla had tried and verified the manual effort and complexity required to use these tools. Although possible, they found it would be an expensive and resource-heavy project. In addition, Correla couldn’t afford any downtime or the potential risk of failure during modernisation.
Due to the complexity of the Gemini Entry application, including a large number of classes and resource interdependencies, a migration without automation would be nearly impossible. The vFunction application was deployed to observe and learn the flows within the applications from the bottom up. vFunction assessed the levels of complexity and technical debt to determine the effort and risk involved in refactoring the application.
vFunction also identified and provided a visual representation of the flows within the application that were difficult to track and map. This gave Correla a thorough insight into Gemini.
The vFunction platform demonstrated how quickly a complex monolithic app can be analysed and broken down into microservices. This significantly reduced the time and risk of manually refactoring the Gemini application. Leveraging the vFunction Hub Studio UI, Correla and Wipro architects were able to refine the architecture and service boundaries while designing the microservices to reduce dependencies and improve isolation.
After successfully identifying the first microservice for guided services extraction, the vFunction platform automated error-prone development tasks. After the service extraction, additional activities were undertaken to complete the end-to-end service. This microservice was then tested successfully in Azure, paving the way for Correla to migrate the entire Gemini application using automation, Machine Learning, and AI.
