Application architecture innovations to address digital business requirements

The digital business imperatives demand a shift in application architecture. The old monolithic or nearly monolithic two- and three-tier application architectures fall short of the required extensibility, versatility, scale and agility of applications, and must be replaced with the agile and extensible nexus-enabled application architecture principles — in order to meet new IT services demands.

Leading edge software engineering teams have developed application architecture innovations to address digital business requirements. These architecture innovations are disruptive and are expected to change your traditional practices, processes, tools and infrastructure. So getting some digital consulting before you venture in them is advised. You should also read about what a digital business is not to get a fair idea.

Application Architecture

An application’s architecture describes the behavior of applications used in a business, focused on how they interact with each other and with users. It refers to the structure and organization of an application system. It directly affects an application’s ability to accommodate digital business requirements. Every application has a set of characteristics that are affected by the underlying architecture.

Application characteristics:

Solution architects use architectural paradigms, such as service-oriented architecture (SOA) and representational state transfer (REST) to help them design agile architecture. These paradigms provide design principles and patterns that influence the structure and organization of the resulting application and impart various desirable characteristics, such as intrinsic interoperability and elastic scalability.

Trends in Application Architecture

We examine the application architecture models and paradigms designed by leading software engineering teams to address digital business development.

1. Apps and Services

The first application trend is a shift away from the monolithic and tightly coupled n-tier applications to decomposed applications. A modern application is a functional ecosystem comprising of a loose association of apps and services. Apps implement the application front end, and services implement the application back end. Together, these apps and services support a particular business domain, such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) or human resources (HR). Unlike traditional applications, modern applications provide multiple entry points (apps) into the functional ecosystem.

The apps and services architecture supports flexibility and agility. Some of the key characteristics include:

1. An app provides a focused, purposeful user experience designed to help the user do one thing well.
2. The back end is a graph of loosely coupled autonomous services.
3. Application boundaries are blurry. An app may call services from multiple business domains, and a service may support multiple business domains.

Leading companies leverage the apps and services architecture to support their digital business requirements. For example, Airbnb provides different apps to support mobile and desktop environments.

1. Fit clients

The shift from one-size-fits-all application interfaces to fit-for-purpose apps has generated renewed investment in client applications. Apps are the new client, they provide rich, interactive experiences from a variety of form factors and environments. Apps can run as independent programs on desktops and mobile devices. They can run in hosting containers, for example, Web apps run in a browser, and social gadgets run in a social network.

 A two-tier client/server application has a fat desktop client in which most of the application code runs on the client, and the back end is just a database. An n-tier client/server application has a thin browser client in which most of the application code runs on the server and the browser just displays content generated by the server. Therefore, in traditional applications, you typically have to choose between a web and native client interface. The two types of interfaces have different architectures. To support both, you practically have to build two different applications. But in the case of modern applications, web and native apps have similar architectures, and a single application can have both types of interface.

Some of the key characteristics of Fit client architecture are:

1. The modern web apps are downloaded to the browser as static files from web server, and the browser acts as the app platform.
2. The app typically implements some variant of MVC (Model-view-controller) design pattern to ensure that the information model associated with the display is not tightly bound to the information model used by the application business logic.
3. The app communicates with the back end using an API.
4. The back end is a set of services that provide data and functional processing to the apps.

Leading companies leverage fit-client architecture to support their digital business requirements. For example, Uber provides a web app for desktop users and a native app for mobile users. The web app lets you manage your profile, view past trips and set up payment methods. The mobile app lets you schedule rides, and it lets you manage your profile and payment methods with some restrictions.

1. Web-scale Back End
   An unexpected success after investing in digital business can blindside an organization. Your application’s back end requires a design that supports agility and rapid scalability, known as web-scale. These web-scale requirements are addressed through a combination of architecture, process and infrastructure innovations. Some of the trends include:

• Advanced SOA
• Cloudy design principles and patterns
• Domain-driven design
• Microservices
• Layered testing strategies
• Continuous delivery
• Platform as a service (PaaS)
• Event-driven web servers
• Event-driven application servers
• Nontraditional data management

1. Software-Defined Architecture

Software-defined architecture is a proven design pattern for managing and controlling hardware resources. The pattern can be applied to the apps and services architecture to improve management and control and to ensure robust operations. This pattern uses a control plane to virtualize physical resources as well as manage and coordinate their APIs. The control plane can also inject added-value capabilities to any resource interaction. The pattern enables intelligent resource management, automation, centralized administration, rapid reconfiguration and more robust operations.

 The key characteristics of software defined architecture are as follows:

1. Control, enablement and enrichment
2. Scalable
3. Layered
4. Policy-driven
5. Extensible
6. Centrally managed
7. Intelligent interception
8. The intermediary layer is invisible
9. Nonintrusive add-ons
10. Requires governance

Weaknesses

These architectural improvements do not come easy and there will be challenges while adopting them.

• Your current applications and services might not fit the model.
• Your development teams may not be familiar with the model.
• Your traditional development tools, frameworks and infrastructure may not support them.
• Your traditional development processes, infrastructure or your culture and organization may not be conducive to them.

To implement the right application architecture, every organization needs to run an internally or externally led digital consulting project. This allows businesses to identify the architecture that works best with their current landscape and future vision.