Software architecture evolution
Cloud adoption has started catching up fast. Initially there are apprehensions about data security & IP protection but gradually cloud adoption has matured with better processes and practices. Initially cloud adoption was perceived to save cost for the organizations. Most of the sales decks mentioned the cost saving by adopting cloud. But very soon people have realized the cost saving are not high enough.
By adopting cloud hosting, things have become more flexible. There are many commonly used services readily available in cloud platforms for applications to leverage. This has cut down the development time further. One good thing about cloud is we do not need to commit ourselves to a certain infrastructure. It helps us to be flexible while making our technology decisions. For small company’s cloud helped save the initial infrastructure cost. It helped many startups to focus and spend on their core innovation thus leading to more successful products.In the earlier decade (2000–2010) the focus was to build more business features to users but since 2010 the focus primarily shifted towards usability. We started seeing the products move away from huge grid layout designs to a more simplified user workflow designs.
Microservices architecture is hugely popular now. This architecture will help to build disjoint components and club them together to complete the business functionality. Since they are disjoint they can be modified and scaled independently. All this was possible primarily due to the numerous features available in all the cloud service provides in the market today. Companies like Netflix, Uber, AirBnB, Dropbox, Amazon have adopted innovative approaches to resolve their unique challenges. People are more open to share their learnings in Opensource forums.
We started seeing more applications built using BigData and Data science being adopted as a mainstream job function. New innovations have come to study the user behavior and studying the data helped in selling targeted products. Things like recommended products, recommended shows/movies have come studying our earlier purchases. This greatly improved the usability of the applications.
Conclusion:
The adoption of Artificial intelligence & deep learning has just begun. I am very certain the years 2020 -2030 will see a dramatic change in the way application are build by keeping Cloud native and AI at the core of the framework. We could see more innovations in the architecture and approaches in the coming 10 years.
Originally published at http://techmonks.org on June 24, 2019.
