I am increasingly speaking with online service providers who are talking about a 2.0 version of their successful 1.0 application. There are many great ideas, but they are often based on lessons learned from the 1.0 version and the underlying cloud platform. It is time to take a broader look at the possibilities of cloud platforms and hop into a hot air balloon: are you coming along?
Because what exactly is a cloud platform? Many successful applications that have been around for a while were developed on a server-based platform: an application server that communicates with a database and retrieves data from a file server. The application is written with the platform in mind. Questions like "which database and how does that fit within the frontend and backend of the application?" are conceived from the context of the 1.0 cloud platform. Yes, scaling is possible by adding more web servers or a larger database. But is this really the best platform for the 2.0 version?
Looking at how startups develop an application without the 1.0 experience (and success), it is completely different: the cloud platform becomes part of the application. This process of complete integration ensures that deployment is automated, but also that the dependency on a traditional setup (such as the common variant with a web server, database server, and file server) disappears entirely. The infrastructure is written into the application development code in the form of a pipeline. A very large, yet interesting difference.
Compare this concept to keeping a pet; the pet arrived as a young animal, was raised for many years, and became part of the family. If it gets sick, it has a major impact. In almost all cases, you see that the 1.0 application also uses such a pet: a fully configured server, patched and monitored, and above all: crucial to the application.
What you actually want is to reduce that dependency on the pet, effectively turning the pet into cattle. Replaceability is much higher than with a pet raised over many years. By treating the cloud platform like a farm with cattle, you can ensure robustness, scalability, and simplicity: failure of a server or service does not interrupt the availability of the application; after all, the integrated application development pipeline ensures the recovery of the components.
Within all the cloud platforms available today, we at Fundaments always look for the best components that fit such a 1.0 to 2.0 challenge. Whether it concerns a static application or an application with erratic user behavior, all scenarios must be covered. Looking at the public cloud, I see many great opportunities with an innovation speed that is hard to beat: for instance, Amazon Web Services already has over 1,200 services that can support all kinds of application components.
Developments in containerization, such as Kubernetes, are also moving very fast: which is not surprising, as developers no longer want to be dependent on correctly configuring a traditional server platform (all those pets). But the key to success lies in the correct selection and integration of these types of techniques. As easy as it may seem to pull a service from the public cloud, also look at the design implications, especially when coming from the 1.0 cloud platform world.
And if we fly even higher in our hot air balloon, you ultimately want to ensure that the platform works for you within an application. From a great height, that cattle looks like an ant colony, and that is what you want: a colony that is indestructible; whether dozens or hundreds of ants die for any reason, or a colony is flooded with water, they survive. This is also what the cloud platform should do for you. That is the ultimate goal I strive for when we guide our clients through the transformation of their highly valuable application.
