Week 1 – Post 2 – Digital Disruption
At EA 874 in the first week we studied about Digital Disruption. These were the suggested readings:
- Finding Your Digital Sweet Spot. How digital transformation drives business value.
- Docker and its Impact.
- Microservices: An Application Powered by the Cloud.
- AWS Well-Architected Framework.
- Digital Disruption: Beyond Big Names And Budgets.
- Top 3 Trends in Application Architecture That Enable Digital Business.
- Measuring the Impacts of Digital Disruption: Introducing Gartner’s Digital Disruption Scale.
- Digital Disruption and Innovation Primer for 2019.
The AWS Well-Architecture Framework establishes some pillars to better take advantage of the power of the cloud: Security, Resiliency, Operational Efficiency, Cost Optimization, Reliability, Performance Efficiency and Sustainability. It brings meaningful and important guidelines to take advantage of the Cloud Computing through the elasticity of cloud, costs optimization, only use the capacity you need when you need in an automatic way, and many more important best practices. And this is very agnostic to any Cloud you intent to adopt, as these are foundational principles to all of them.
The Cloud can make Docker’s impact even more powerful as Lucas Carlson states in Docker and its Impact as creates a more concise and flexible way to deliver applications specially micro-services. The cloud makes infrastructure and devops tools out of the box to be used as soon as needed, as It provides a self service and just in time way to provision resources. In the same way, is easier to create composable applications and microservices, as you can state using Infrastructure as a Code the basis of the environment and reuse the reference architectures to expedite new solutions that have assured security, the company guidelines and rules that can be forced into an Infrastructure as a Code (IAAC) script reference.
Connecting with the Gartner’s Composable Reference Architecture described in ourPost 1 once we define our business goals and which business contexts are important, cloud helps to expedite the creation and evolvement of each Packaged Business Capability, make it continuously integrated and delivered through DevOps and expedite the journey defining by script integration layers through IaaC.
Week 1 – Post 1 – Application Architecture
In the first week we studied the Application Architecture with some meaningful readings:
- Back to the Basics.
- Strategic Architecture Roadmap for Composable Enterprise Applications (Presentation).
- Hype Cycle for Application Architecture and Development.
- Adapt Your Application Architecture Practices to Work Better With DevOps Teams.
An important concept described are the Composable Enterprise Applications. It defines based on business topics applications’ boundaries that exposes the important business functions through APIs or events mechanisms like IoT MQTT messaging, publish subscriber approaches, queues etc.
The reference architecture that Gartner proposes is truly meaningful and shows a path that can still consider previous investments made or applications that are third-party, not easy to modernize or convert in micro-services. Many OT applications have this characteristics and using events to help to decouple them, to allow innovation and agility, but at the same time use them as a composable application help company to create a roadmap to still keep and evolve some old of third-party applications while create new cloud native and based in micro services for other scenarios that are feasible.
The Gartner’s Reference Architecture for Intelligent Composable Business Applications defines how these applications can be organized. In the top of the image belo, you find the composed application experiences that can address specific business scenarios and just below to it a Composition Platform that enables the business to compose it and create different compositions for products and processes. Here also the concept of a marketplace of solutions is very key, as can help to expose to the corporation investments already made, avoid duplicated investments and also give flexibility and agility as provides a self service approach to consume business services.
In the left we have Business Operation applications and in the right Data Management Applications (Analytics Applications) that are integrated providing a 360° view of the information for customers, products and other important data entities. The integrated Data Fabric works to maintain the data lineage, organize information and make it ready to be used.
Source: NATYS, Yefim. Strategic Architecture Roadmap for Composable Enterprise Applications.
Considering this reference architecture, we can connect technologies described by SINGH, Abhishek and O’NEILL, Mark on Hype Cycle for Application Architecture and Development. 2020 to make this concept even more powerfull. Cloud native applications can help to expedite the launch of new applications and make it easier to scale to meet unexpected or seasonal demands, also DevOps helps to deliver each composed application evolutions and having these decoupled business topics, each one can evolve without the risk of impact others. Also Low Code is very powerful on composition layer giving to citizen/business developers the power of using pre stablished APIs and connections using their knowledge to compose them and easily create new scenarios.