Industry leaders came together on 26 October at the 12 Apostles Hotel & Spa in Cape Town to share their thoughts and experiences about how companies can modernise and accelerate their data and AI strategies.
While there was some talk about technology, the conversation centred more on the importance of leveraging technology to design for the customer. Most of the representatives present noted that businesses continue to modernise their applications and are evolving their architectures to a microservices architecture.
At its simplest level, a microservice is a small app that does one thing as part of a larger collective that make up the complete application. These microservices are housed in a container and are effectively a single responsibility function that communicates using APIs, or application programming interfaces, with other services. Microservices are not a requirement to start this journey and lots of monolithic applications work really well in containers, showing fantastic benefits.
“It was great to spend time with these IT leaders and to see how much effort is being put into modernisation of their businesses. It was great to have people validate what they are doing, or receive feedback that can help them on their journey. The open sharing was great to experience,” said LSD Open head of solutions Deon Stroebel.
Businesses are finding that there are several benefits of these newer technology architectures. These include adaptability and improved agility. Agility is enhanced as there is less reliance on other teams when making changes to systems. Microservices have allowed companies to de-risk their technology environment by minimising the “blast radius”.
Security is also improved, with the ability to deploy updates much quicker. Having much smaller pieces of code helps programmers pick up possible vulnerabilities that may be built into the system. It also allows new developers to be onboarded more quickly. And it allows for more language-agnostic development. This provides developers the opportunity and freedom to build using more appropriate languages for the problem that needs to be solved.
Elasticity
The elasticity of services is also greatly improved. With Black Friday on the way, online shopping platforms can quickly scale their services, meaning they won’t fall over as they have in the past.
There are also several unintended benefits, including faster innovation cycles with higher levels of customer-focused innovation. However, although there are many benefits of microservices architectures, the concept can also be oversold. It’s prudent that leaders spend time deciding how atomic the structure of the microservices should be, finding the right balance and continuously leveraging the right one at the right time.
The 2022 State of DevOps report found that increased modernisation and cloud usage is predictive of organisational performance. Companies that move to a cloud-native model show higher organisational performance directly correlated to the extent of modernisation.
Whether your business is running an extensive monolithic system or one like Netflix or Amazon that natively uses these newer architectures, it’s clear that the best way to start is by starting.
While starting with the technology is good, it’s also necessary to look more broadly at the people, processes and culture of the organisation. It is evident that where companies see themselves as digital businesses first, irrespective of their industry, they tend to perform better.
This requires businesses that are organised around value. It requires structures where there is no discrepancy between business and technology; only teams that work cohesively to build innovative solutions for the customer. Organisations that see themselves as digital-first tend to have happier, more productive employees, which in turn, creates higher levels of customer satisfaction, translating into higher sales and ultimately, increased growth.
However, this shift requires a culture that favours experimentation, a culture of psychological safety, one where people are not fearful of making small mistakes. Creating space to innovate improves innovation.
These are also strategic decisions, given that we are not just building for now; we are building for flexibility in the future.
As leaders, we must remember that customers don’t care about microservices architectures or how the organisation is structured, whether the company moving to the cloud or is utilising some great new technology. A customer wants an easy, seamless and enjoyable experience when buying something.
Businesses must continue making it all about the customer. Using microservices as building blocks will unlock innovation by allowing employees to focus on the customer, improve operational performance and create more engaging experiences.
For more information, contact LSD Open — details below.
About LSD Open
LSD was founded in 2001 and wants to inspire the world by embracing OPEN philosophy and technology. LSD is your cloud-native acceleration partner that provides managed platforms, leveraging a foundation of containerisation, Kubernetes and open-source technologies. We deliver modern platforms for modern applications. For more, visit www.lsdopen.io, e-mail [email protected] or visit us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or GitHub.
About SUSE
SUSE is a global leader in innovative, reliable and secure enterprise-grade open source solutions, relied upon by more than 60% of the Fortune 500 to power their mission-critical workloads. We specialise in business-critical Linux, enterprise container management and edge solutions, and collaborate with partners and communities to empower our customers to innovate everywhere – from the data centre, to the cloud, to the edge and beyond.
SUSE puts the “open” back in open source, giving customers the agility to tackle innovation challenges today and the freedom to evolve their strategy and solutions tomorrow. The company employs more than 2 000 people globally. SUSE is listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.
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