By Rajesh Srinivas Rao, Senior Vice President – Delivery Operations, CriticalRiver
Today’s organizations are often expected to be agile and scale delivery to meet market demand when the time to delivery decides business outcomes. At a time when hyper-competition is forcing companies to think radically and out of the box, modern delivery models can play a significant role in embedding future tech into legacy environments at speed and scale to beat the competition and stay relevant. It is vital for organizations to rapidly assemble delivery and release on demand to meet the customer demand for flexibility, scalability, and agility.
High-performing organizations are leading a paradigm shift toward enhanced business agility by harnessing new technologies and modern delivery models such as SAFe 5 – Scaled Agile Framework for Lean Enterprises. Additionally, these organizations are scaling lean and agile practices along with large-scale scrum and disciplined delivery, utilizing industry best practices for a continuous delivery platform with continuous exploration, integration, and deployment. This enables more frequent code deployment and Release on Demand (just like JIT manufacturing!) Of late, there has been an increased focus on adapting modern architectures that aid business agility.
Modern Architecture Adoption is on the Rise
If we look at monolithic legacy architectures vs. microservice architectures, adapting to modern technical architectures gives the impetus to define a new and modern delivery mechanism. An analysis of industry data on modern application architecture adoption shows that most large-scale software companies, such as Twitter, Unilever, Netflix, and Amazon, use a microservices architecture.
Microservices enable developers to break apart applications into decoupled cloud services, containerizing each piece. They drive higher agility, efficiency (efficient use of code and underlying infrastructure, CD, incremental delivery, increase in team agility and frequency of new deliveries, where small changes don’t necessitate redeployment of entire applications, faster iterations, and reduced downtime), and resiliency (removing the single point of failure by separating functionality across multiple services).
Modern software development demands & necessitates adopting areas like DevSecOps at the beginning and not once the software is fully developed with a critical focus on security automation across all phases—from initiation and design through testing, deployment, and delivery. The traditional waterfall model looked at this differently. But with the advent of agile, DevSecOps has embedded application and infra security into the DevOps process by utilizing tools that address security concerns at the beginning, saving time and effort. This is akin to ensuring defect prevention, where a defect flow that originated at the design stage would pass through various development and testing phases and be identified only after the code is complete. Accurately implementing DevSecOps will improve traceability, ensure better auditable environments, and provide a more secure environment.
With an increased focus on abstracting insights from a large pool of data, organizations are also looking to create what-if models, expert systems, and smart decision outcomes. The day is not far when insurance premiums will be driven by chatbots that process historical data. Financial, Wealth and investment planners will get proactive, customized advice based on their client’s past financial data and present it to Clients to make right decisions. These new systems are adaptive, learning from massive data and enabling trust with the right outcomes for all situations.
The Takeaway: Technology is the Enabler
To summarize, addressing Cloud, Big Data, IoT, AI/ML, and Agile CI/CD/DevSecOps needs will require modern delivery models to adapt and expand to ensure that technology relooks at innovative ways to meet evolving business demands.
With disruption comes a renewed focus on innovative ways to overcome disruptions. We have all seen how the pandemic accelerated the need for IoT and touchless technologies and pushed digital adoption for businesses across the board, including manufacturing, where production units were operating at reduced capacity, with the workforce placed under lockdowns.
Businesses will have to relook at their tech investments with a broader outlook of available tech tools and processes to install new paradigms into legacy architectures enabling them to have a supportive tech landscape for expansion.
In the end, as I always believe, technology is the bridge and enabler to fulfilling business needs. Clients can use the above modern delivery models to ensure a competitive advantage and an enhanced ROI with scalable, extensible, safe, and efficient solutions.
