Cloud Native Architecture — Application Architecture
About Me: Application Architect at Oildex, a Services of Transzap Inc,.
Where is Technology going today? — Current Industry Trends
- Augmented Reality (AR)
- Big Data Analytics
- Bio Technology
- Block Chain
- Chat Bots
- Digital Platforms thinking
- Internet of Things (IoT)
- Partner Integrations
- Self Driving everything
- Smart Home
- Virtual Reality (VR)
What are some things driving this Enterprise Architecture move for organizations?:
- Technology Refresh has become very important for Enterprises today to get into innovation train with current Trends.
- Business Operations mindset is shifting from CAPEX → OPEX models with the stronger adoption of Cloud Services (IaaS, SaaS, PaaS).
- Cloud First Approach and Hybrid clouds are in the best interests of enterprise organizations of all level.
- Everyone has great ideas. However, Speed wins the competition.
- Web Scale has become the de-facto
- Need of a State of the Art Enterprise Analytics solutions for customers. Time is a factor and analytics plays a key role providing customers predictiveness, cognitive analytics.
- To Attract new talent. Software developers hate to work on legacy technologies and ideas these days.
- Future-proofing yourself as an organization for years to come. Due to Technologies come and go like rats.
The most challenging thing for organizations to adopt Cloud Native Architecture today is Change in Mindset.
- Recast technology strategy as part of the overall business strategy.
- Break down the silos between applications, information, and integration.
- Enable everyone to apply new technologies to advance the enterprise.
- Expect change and build organizations and systems to adapt.
- Remember that acquiring the technical skills is the easy part — changing the culture of the organization will be much harder.
Cloud Native Architecture is so important today then ever before to run software business in such an efficient way. Every solution is some form of a combination of web & applications. What makes Cloud Native Architecture possible?:
Twelve Factor Application Development
- Early stages of software development mindset were blocking context for a user in every way possible. Which puts limitation over resource utilization. Reactive Architecture is key for all architecture Layers to enable the power of all the underlying resources to leverage at its 100% capabilities. The Reactive Manifesto provides those guidelines to make solutions Non-blocking. Client and Back-end development is being done with reactive guidelines.
Web Scale
Microservices Architecture enables that speed required to beat your competitors in software Development.
- Isolating Silo’s between Developers, QA and Operations and Adoption of DevOps is becoming reality through MicroService Architecture.
- True value of Software organizations are displayed in almost no time delivery and individual components DURS (Deploy, Update, Release, Stop)
- As one of the well-known magazine stated that Data is new Oil of this century. which brings self-service models via API Market Place to enable Developers to build more and more products leveraging available data.
Isomorphic Web
- Competition between — Native Application vs Hybrid Application vs Web Application is becoming much cleaner due to possibilities into Web Application for Mobile, Tablet, and any internet enabled devices.
- Progressive Web Applications is the way to go to provide User a Rich experience for Mobile, Tablet, and other devices.
- Single Page Applications (SPA): Client application development is already super complicated and requires a ton of effort should be making sure how we can simplify it as an Architecture. Static application deployed behind software load balancer/gateway like Nginx or others.
- Modernizing build and deployment pipeline using workflow automation for your front-end development.
- Mobile First/Enabled Approach,
- Accessibility, i18n, and Environments: While designing solutions in twenty first centuary makes sense to consider enabling your solution at 100% for the Disable Individuals without any extra effort. Part of Environments will be supporting devices and platforms being invented every day.
- Product Unification is a big part of Digital Platforms using unified theme approach
- Progressive Web Applications — (PWA)
- Responsive Design,
- Network Independent,
- Native App Like behavior,
- Fresh,
- Secure,
- Discoverable,
- Re-engageable — Push Notifications,
- Installable,
- Linkable, etc.
- Technologies like React, Angular, has simplified and advanced Client Side web application developments.
Streaming Fast Data — Making data available in almost no time is key in twenty first century. Natural Language Processing, Big Data — Machine Learning have changed the game in this area performing millions and billions of complex operations using technologies like Spark, Hadoop, Kafka, Scala, so much more.
Infrastructure as a Code/Service — Elastic Infrastructure
- Days where System Admins were stacked with ordering and provisioning of infrastructures required for enterprises. Cloud has enabled almost everyone to learn that skillset now.
- Hybrid Cloud is so important for businesses today to not lock their selves with Cloud Providers and ability to use right tools, vendors for each job. Hybrid Cloud also helps reducing a cost of Technical Operations compares to maintaining your own infrastructure at Data Centers or in your organization’s remote locations.
- Automation at scale infrastructure has become reality with Automation — Infrastructure as a Code and Services like Infrastructure as a Service (e.g: AWS EC2 is the core of their cloud business).
- Immutable Infrastructure to auto scale in a matter of seconds or minutes.
- A Container as a Service using technology like Docker is a disruption in a good way before Server Less Architecture takes it all at full pace.
DevOps
Came across one of the awesome analogy for DevOps. Missed source of it.
“Dev’s get to go on dates and get married, Ops get to run the family and get divorced.” — DevOps gets the whole lifecycle!
2017 State of the DevOps reports brings statistics of High, Medium and Low IT Performers and High performers having an establishment of DevOps culture. Architecture correlates to Continuous Delivery and IT Performance.
- Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery Pipeline
- Blue-Green Deployments
- Canary Releases
- Monitoring and Alerting
- Chat Ops
Analytics
- Enterprise Search and Dashboard Analytics: Users daily need of advanced search and dashboard analytics capabilities could be satisfied using tools like Elastic Search, to give you room for your Enterprise Analytics research and planning.
- Descriptive: Get in touch with Reality, a single source of the truth, Visibility → What happened?
- Diagnostic/Cognitive: Deeply analytical computing systems that learn & interact naturally with People → Why did that happen?
- Predictive: Understand the most likely future scenarios, and its business implications → What will happen?
- Prescriptive: Collaborate for maximum business value, Informed by advance analytics → What should I do?
- Self-Service Data: Data Pipeline Design, Data as a Product
- Visualization & Instrumentation
Partner Integration
- Organization mergers and acquisitions are happening on on-going bases. Integration of different organizations, internal solutions integration or partnering with other products will become easier through Federated Single Sign-On.
Data Architecture
- Decentralized Component Specific Databases
- Data Classification
- Backup & Achieving
Security
- We live in a state today where every individual or businesses are scared of being a victim of Vulnerability Attacks.
- Password Less Solutions are becoming more and more popular with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), Digital Fingerprinting, Bio Metrics, etc. Solutions like OKTA, Forge Rock, Auth0, Ping are playing a key role for digital identity authentication and authorization in the world of Internet of Things (IoT).
- Personal Information are being sold to their party organizations for some sort of revenue. Which makes Individuals more vulnerable. Governments are becoming much more active now to stop solicitation of data to third parties. For e.g.: European Government activated GDPR — General Data Protection Regulations, which will come into forces from May 25th, 2018 with very high penalties to put those organizations out of business.
User Experience
- Performance is becoming First class citizen.
- We are learning now that Bad Security is Bad experience.
Education and Training becomes a key part of organizations to advance within to achieve cloud native architecture and so does for career opportunities of the individuals employed by organizations.
Avoid Lock-ins in your Digital business to keep Agility in your own hands from Enterprise Architecture point-of-view:
- Business Lock-in: Making sure your digital solution should be easy to expand or put steps in other industries, if have to.
- Legal Lock-in
- Financial Lock-in: Financial commitment in terms of committing to third party solutions or vendors or less performing teams.
- Contractual Lock-in: From experience and case studies have come across this one the most then any thing else. Partners not collaborating in a right direction to generate revenue.
- Technology Lock-in: As most of all the above items described gives pretty good idea that as an architecture we make sure we should be able to replace or upgrade any Technology Component with less effort and less impact on eco systems.
- Proximity/Topology Lock-in
Serverless Architecture is another level with bigger concern of giving away that full control to the providers, which is basically the biggest concern moving to it from culture or change in mindset perspective. Similar to Platform as a Services. Definitely worth having a separate story for Serverless Architecture and Platform as a Services. I will also try to offer more insight into each of items discussed above independently.
