Modern applications must innovate rapidly as possible as the digital business they are involved in to maintain a competitive advantage. It is common to both Web Applications and Mobile Applications.

As an example; only a few years ago the whole marketing was relying on television and radio commercials, printed adverts in newspapers and magazines. But today businesses rely more and more on online marketing (also known as Digital Marketing), advertising on social media and making their business more ‘searchable’ than their competitors. With the help of a professional digital marketing agency, now everyone is able to track and get feedback on client interactions with the marketing campaigns.

Organizations change how they run the business operation all the time. So should the applications. Personalization, customer tracking, scaling rapid change has to be taken into account developing when building modern applications.

Here we discuss a list of boxes every modern web and mobile application should tick to be successful.

Security and compliance
    • Applications security is paramount. Similarly, ensure applications meet compliance requirements. Prevent unauthorized access with strong access control. Implement role-based access controls using policies mirroring real organization roles. Compliance requirements such as PCI and GDPR governs a level of globally accepted security and client data protection which will assure the clients that our systems are secure for them to access, download data from, submit their personal data and make payments.
When talking about application security it goes without saying that each step in the process should be validated to ensure solutions work only as intended.
Microservices
    • We are so used to build applications as a big entity, which we call Monolithic applications. One application which defines every single functionality, single stream for deployment and releases, hard to scale/ add new functionality and almost impossible to adapt to new/ updates of underlining technology.
Using microservices as much as possible will enable to overcome those obstacles. The essence of microservices is to split your monolithic application into small parts depending on their functionality. Each microservice would be responsible for doing one thing, will have its own deployment cycle, scale independently, small impact on the application in whole and liberty of selecting its own technology to build on.
Serverless
    • Building with serverless technologies will free you from the hassle of managing infrastructure. These technologies would automatically allocate recourses to the application depending on the demand, so we don’t have to worry about scaling.
It will have the option of shutting down services completely if needed which will save money. Which will not be possible if we maintain our own infrastructure. Also, these services will be highly available and durable. Popular serverless platforms are AWS Lambda, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and IBM OpenWhisk. These platforms support microservices as well and becoming increasingly popular.
Model applications and infrastructure
    • Infrastructure is also a part of the application and its importance is the same as the code. Creating infrastructure templates should start right from the design phase and go through the software development life cycle (design->test->iterate).
Container technologies like Docker and Kubernetes will help to achieve this. Ideally, release infrastructure changes using the same tools as code changes. They will be tracked and versioned. A good example for these types of files is the Dockerfile and AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM). These have syntax to define API endpoints, databases etc. This will enable developers to create an exact replica of the production environment at once and do testing. This is a massive leap from having 3 separate environments for testing, staging, and production.

Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)

    • Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery/ Deployment is the methodology moving forward with modern application development. Of course, this will be achieved by using microservices. Through delivery pipelines of each service teams would continuously build->test->release->monitor the deployments. Because of this constant change, there will be more frequent deployments, move faster from committing code to deployment and because changes are split into smaller tasks there will be lower failure rate. Even though there is an issue with a previous release it will get fixed soon because of CI/CD.
Monitor & Analyzing Behavior
    • Monitoring is a way of getting feedback on the products. Based on that applications can be changed to optimize the end user experience. Logs, traces, monitoring alerts and debugging them on the code and using services such as Google analytics to get real-time insights can be used to monitor and observe functionality and user interactions.
Faster the issues are identified, faster they can be resolved.

We always figure out how to run business operations even when the environment changes rapidly. Similarly, we’ll have to change how we build software applications. Maintaining servers in-house and deploying code as new releases every month or every other month is gone now. We should be able to do rapid changes in our applications to cater to the rapidly changing businesses.

Web Applications and Mobile Applications are always used to be one step behind the business it caters, but now it’s the time to be one step ahead. That will be the next era of modern applications.

The Author, Udayantha Warnasuriya (MSc, BSc)

Udayantha is into enterprise application development and he usually prefers to keep an air of mystery about him.

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