CTO Guide: How to Master Modern Application Development Challenges and Achieve Success?
Legacy systems are often considered the backbone of an organization's technology infrastructure.
Read moreWhat are the best practices for building and deploying modern applications?
Ganesh Rout, SVP
According to AWS Report, 67% of businesses believe that to stay competitive, picking up modern applications is essential. That’s not all. The AWS report also states that 56% of businesses have stated that in their organization Modern Application Development improvements have increased profits within the first year.
Modern application development is a robust strategy for developing, building, and managing cloud-based software. This tested approach enhances the dependability and security of applications, as well as the agility of development teams, enabling businesses to create and deploy better products more efficiently.
But before we delve into the details of how to build and deploy modern applications that are agile and moves faster-than-human speed, let’s take you through the four crucial attributes that modern apps must possess:
- Scalability: Today, enterprises need applications that can scale to millions of users worldwide. The best way to ensure your app can handle this is to design it using a microservices architecture that helps to break down your app into smaller, more manageable pieces that can be scaled up or down as needed.
- Portability: It has become imperative for organizations to build modern apps that can run across multiple cloud and on-premises environments, giving enterprises the flexibility to choose the right cloud providers, draw skilled talent to manage their applications, and, most importantly, increase platform reliability.
- Resilience: When it comes to resiliency, modern apps set the bar higher than traditional applications. In a world increasingly reliant on networks, there is an increasing need for more-resilient apps that customers can depend on. One way to build resilience into your app is by using a distributed systems design pattern known as “the circuit breaker.” This pattern helps prevent cascading failures by monitoring communication channels between services and automatically opening and closing circuits as needed.
- Agility: Agility in the modern software world is no longer a nice to have—agility is now the need of the day for businesses of all sizes. The key to achieving agility is Continuous Delivery (CD)—the practice of frequently delivering small changes to your software to minimize risk and maximize value. The CD model helps teams move faster and respond more quickly to changing customer demands.
Now that we have shared an understanding of the four crucial attributes of modern applications, let’s dive into the seven best practices that will help in designing, deploying and maintaining a successful modern application:
Encourage Innovation by Creating a Culture of Ownership
Innovation begins with every individual member of your team that builds, runs, and maintains modern applications. Giving these people ownership of the entire application lifecycle, right from taking customer input, developing and operating the application, and planning the road map, makes them feel empowered to deliver better customer outcomes.
Autonomy encourages your team, opens the door to creativity, and helps build a risk-taking culture amidst an environment of trust. Creating a culture of ownership involves changing the structure and mindset of your organization and the work for which your team is responsible.
Build Applications that are Platform Agnostic
Platform-agnostic applications are not tied to any specific system or platform and can run on multiple platforms in the same way. You can run them on GCP, Azure, AWS, or any other cloud platform, irrespective of the provider or language used.
Use of Micro-service-based Design to Build Applications
Despite building a strong culture of ownership, your organization may still struggle to scale up application architecture, preventing your development team from taking ownership of the final product. Therefore, it is always recommended to use micro-service-based design to create modern apps faster and with new features. Microservices architecture enables your development teams to use frameworks that are most appropriate for the service they are developing.
Automate the Release Pipeline through CI/CD
Microservices architecture is a great way to improve the speed of your application release cycle. By breaking down your application into smaller services, microservices architecture provides greater flexibility and enables your team to move faster through the release pipeline.
But with manual processes in use, there are high chances that your traditional release pipeline may slow down, preventing your team from providing new features to customers faster. This is where automating each step of the release process, from code changes to testing and deploying through continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) processes, can help.
Continuous Integration (CI) ensures that code has gone through several dependency checks and unit and integration tests and comprises a successful build. If there are any bugs in the path or the build fails, your app team is informed at the right time to take immediate measures. Therefore, using CI entails testing each change to the application before deploying it. The CI-built code output is always organized and prepared for deployment in one or more environments employing Continuous Delivery (CD).
Model Application Resources Using Infrastructure as Code
It can be challenging to scale the infrastructure seamlessly as the application grows. Businesses want a consistent environment that can readily grow or alter based on application needs to keep all resources functioning as planned. Moreover, by modeling all application resources and infrastructure as code, your team may programmatically provide and modify resources.
Businesses may supply their resources in a secure, repeatable manner using infrastructure as code, enabling them to construct and rebuild the infrastructure and applications without having to carry out manual tasks or create customized scripts.
Leverage Serverless Technologies
By using serverless technologies, it is possible to create and maintain applications and services without setting up and maintaining servers.
Serverless solutions provide a firm with an operational framework that automates high availability, removes server maintenance, offers flexible scaling, and enables businesses to pay only for value. The framework of serverless technologies makes it possible to create and manage application components that provide value to customers without worrying about the underlying processes.
Improve Application Performance by Increasing Observability
The world of monitoring modern applications is different and more challenging than observing a monolithic app built on-premises. Moreover, the use of microservices adds further complexities when monitoring modern apps in production, as one has to monitor many things. As a result, enterprises struggle to get an accurate and real-time view of their applications.
Faster solutions are made possible by full observability that requires metrics, logs, and traces to give a detailed overview of metrics such as response times, error rates, etc. Businesses that have a unified picture of their resources through full observability can fully trace and correlate all the metrics to provide an understanding of what is going on in the system and respond accordingly to application and customer problems.
Securing the Entire Application Lifecycle Through Automation
Every phase of the app development lifecycle and every app element should incorporate security and compliance. Allowing businesses fine-grained control over the security policies of each microservice and its architectural patterns can enhance the security of applications.
Securing apps in the cloud requires integrating security capabilities more deeply into software engineering and addressing security throughout the entire application lifecycle, not just at checkpoints. Applications can be kept secure without slowing down the development process by automating the process of testing that security features are working as intended.
To Sum It Up
Modern Application Development creates competitive differentiation by facilitating rapid innovation. Firms can reallocate resources from regular operations to differentiating activities by altering their architectural pattern, operational model, and software delivery process using the best practices of modern application development. Businesses may experiment more and create releases more quickly which can encourage a culture where builders invest more time in construction.
Looking for modern application development solutions for your business? Quinnox can help align your business needs with the latest innovations, modernize your applications through continuous testing, and meet your user needs by delivering maximum ROI.
Learn more about implementing the best practices of modern application development from one of our experts. Get in touch with us today!
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