Today’s innovative organizations focus on multiple initiatives, including delivering a product to market and creating an application that customers love. Many applications use emerging technologies including cloud, containers, microservices and distributed applications, which promise greater flexibility, lower cost and faster release cycles.
One of the challenges of building an innovative application is how it adjusts to the changes within business. Traditional business-critical software often exists in monolithic blocks that are impossible to move to new infrastructure or storage options without lots of effort and time. The applications are hard to upgrade since updating even one small portion means rebuilding and retesting the entire thing. Finally, there is also difficulty in managing applications with different versions.
Our work with customers provides them the power to overcome the lag of manual processes and antiquated tools while also serving the business side. Application modernization projects can be extremely complicated since legacy, monolithic enterprise applications are intrinsically dependent on underlying infrastructure and data stores, but there are ways to make it work. In this blog post, we address five essentials that should be part of every application before it goes to market.
- Essential #1: On-Demand: All enterprise applications should be on-demand, meaning the provisioning of new instances should be hands-free and fully automated. On-demand applications provide instant access and higher customer satisfaction.
- Essential #2: DevOps Friendly: All enterprise applications should consist of a number of building blocks: APIs, web servers with content, databases seeded with data, security policies, the operating system, network configurations, deployment configurations and application binaries. The ability to break enterprise applications into smaller pieces allows for components that can act as independent services, providing easier upgrade and faster deployment to new applications as needed.
- Essential #3: Scalable: Scaling application and infrastructure environments automatically, on-demand, and in near real-time is one of the essential capabilities that makes modern infrastructure so valuable. Scalability in the cloud provides cost flexibility, performance improvements, and greater revenue producing opportunities.
- Essential #4: Easy Upgrades: Upgrading enterprise applications should be made much easier by taking a point-and-click, push-button approach through a modern UI and integration with continuous deployment tools. Ease of upgrade also means the ability to eliminate manual errors that arise, allowing work to continue with minimal disruption.
- Essential #5: Centralized Management: By taking an end-to-end view of the enterprise application development, testing, deployment and management process, it’s now possible to create a “single pane of glass” console that gives development and deployment teams a powerful way to manage what’s been deployed to various infrastructures in the organization. A centralized approach is important, allowing for increased visibility and accountability for innovation projects within the organization.
In all, the modern application provides increased potential for usefulness and modernization, saving money on operations while creating numerous new opportunities. When paired together with businesses in any industry, IT leaders find a path of infinity possibility.
Invite Us on Your DevOps Journey
Is your organization on a path to innovation? Bring our expertise along today and send us an email at sales@perficient.com to see how we can help. Then download our DevOps guide below for even more innovation best practices.
