Achieving highly scalable serverless execution architecture and simplifying operations of DevOps

In this fast-paced digital age, enterprises need to transform the way they do business, Today’s customers expect a customized and seamless experience no matter where and how (online or offline) they want to access your services or buy your products, customers also want new product features and new experiences faster, In short, since they have so many options to choose from, the attention span of the customer has reduced.

And Enterprises must fight it out to remain at the center of the customer's attention span, there are multiple business tricks that enterprises must deploy to gain that attention span, such as providing Customized and seamless user experience irrespective of their geography or the mode of interaction (Online or offline), To achieve such results Enterprises must be able to analyses and predict the market behavior in advance and release products and features that are always ahead of the market Curve.

However, to achieve such expertise and capabilities, enterprises must be able to understand the mood of the "Market and the customers" in advance and they should be able to deliver the desired user experience to the customer, partners, stakeholders, etc faster.

To implement these business/customer needs, enterprises need an equally competent technology/tool stack and processes that can capture data from disparate sources, analyze the captured data, scale up or scale down as the business needs and new platform features and updates that can release faster to market, we have identified that these changes can be achieved by embarking on a "Digital Business Transformation" journey.

Today's Business are achieving these capabilities by visualizing their business as an evolving platform and by Introducing modern business platforms into their existing practices.

These Modern Business platforms have some of the following standard tenets such as

Open: The platform should be able to onboard new stakeholders (New Customers, partners, suppliers, etc) with ease.

Connected: the platform should be able to connect to a varied set of systems through API's or connectors.

Intelligent: All the data that is collected should materialize into some valuable insights that will help the enterprise take decisions for Customization, Predictive Analysis, reporting Etc that’s when the platform must have the "intelligent tenets"

Scalable: Due to the highly flexible nature of today’s modern business, the platform should be able to scale up or down as per the business needs and add new features and Functionalities easily to the platform

As enterprises are creating New Data platforms, and Developing/Deploying new platforms by Modernizing the UI/UX of these platform with modern technology stack such as App Services, Functions, Gateways etc, the development process to build these applications is also changing, with the introduction of DevOps framework, enterprises are now changing the cultural mindset of the enterprises and paving the way for rapid experimentation and continuous change, DevOps implementation requires intense collaboration between different Development, testing and Deployment teams.

And since the technology is changing so quickly, it virtually impossible for a single team to understand everything, that’s why teams are made to focus of smaller domains by essentially breaking down the applications into smaller parts with "Microservices", without such architecture the fast pace of digital transformation will not be possible.

Microservices architecture helps in composing the application into individual, autonomous functions, and where each function is hosted independently by the (Function as a Service) FaaS provider, with this Enterprises can put their complete focus on the platform/application code as the hosting environment / Infrastructure is taken care by the FaaS provider,

FaaS is also called Serverless architecture and it’s now becoming easier than ever to create small, targeted microservice architecture using a variety of services. Azure provides an ideal platform for hosting microservices because it offers managed services that allow developers to create microservices that can run reliably and at scale.

Functions: It allows developers to use a number of languages to create “functions” to perform a task. The events can be raised by another service running on cloud or by a custom trigger, azure functions support several different languages and it can scale infinitely to support complex and heavy workloads.

Service Fabric: It consists of compute nodes which are managed by Azure and it addresses the challenges in developing and managing cloud applications by allowing the developer to focus on implementing mission-critical workloads that are scalable, reliable, and manageable, service fabric are very easy to manage, highly reliable and they are highly scalable.

Serverless architecture can be cost-effective solution for businesses with high degree of variance in their technology usage, enterprise need to modernize their legacy applications into modern platforms by architecting the application with Modern technologies (Microservices, containers etc) and practices (DevOps etc), Since in a Serverless architecture or FaaS environment enterprises only pay for the time their function gets called, rather than paying to have the application always on and waiting for requests on different instances, enterprises end up saving cost.

Following DevOps process in building platforms requires a resilient, dynamic and observable technology stack that enables it to support more rapid changes in the platform, such a technology stack can only be achieved by embarking on a digital business transformation journey.

While digital transformation is not a one-Off activity, it is an ongoing process of keeping up with the changing needs of the business and enabling them to be always ahead of the Curve in identifying new business avenues and new Business prospects.

It is no secret that Enterprises are putting significant investments in Digital Transformation. However, A study reveals that 90% of all digital projects fail because most enterprises believe the concoction of adopting digital technologies to modernize existing applications or simply adopting new technology solutions will do the trick.

That’s not true, because REAL digital transformation needs new principles and application of those new principles to architect business processes and solutions.

That’s When Sonata comes IN with our Trademarked Platformation Framework,

What is platformation

Well platformation is a trademarked term coined by Sonata Software, it essentially says that for enterprises to survive in this modern business arena, they need to modernize the way they do business, Today enterprises need to collaborate with multiple companies, they need to reach customers faster and they should be able to adapt to the changing market needs at a faster rate

Sonata's Platformation™ framework outlines ways to identify the applications that are critical to your business and that are not critical to your business, this process is called digital profiling of your applications and application stack.

Applications which are not critical to your business may not require modernization, but they can be modified using serverless architectures in cloud that will minimize the cost of running them and also optimized to extract maximum benefits.

However, the applications which are critical for your business to operate smoothly, actually needs detailed attention, they need to be investigated thoroughly, their architecture needs to be understood thoroughly, their dependencies mapped thoroughly and then identify the right technologies such as (containers, app services etc.) to be used to modernize the application.

Identifying the right set of applications to be migrated and Modernized with the right kind of technology / features is essentially Platformation framework,

Then Comes Sonata’s trademarked and unique Platform Engineering Methodology

Platform engineering methodology guides us in modernizing application in such a way that they can support and complement modern digital infrastructure stack, Sonata believes Modern applications should have traits like Open, Scalable, connected and Intelligent, and these traits can only be achieved when we design application and their architectures to take advantage of the modern technologies with the help of sonata's proprietary tools and frameworks, this approach will help us create these cloud-native applications at scale that are truly modern and that compliments your organizations growing requirements and growth ambitions.

Conclusion

And to achieve true Digital transformation Enterprises must Re-Imagine their complete digital Stack, simply Modernizing their legacy application and infrastructure stack will not be sufficient, they need a competent partner who has Skills, Certifications, Capabilities, and Tools to execute such platforms.

Read more about Sonata’s Platformation™ & Platform Engineering Services.