Key 5 capabilities of every modern business application

In this keynote Vytenis Sakalas, Cloud Enthusiast at BTT Cloud - part of Skaylink, shares few most important capabilities that every modern business and web application should have.

00:00 Key 5 capabilities
00:32 Modularity
01:37 Elasticity
02:35 Security and automation
03:52 Resiliency

MODULARITY
Modern application should not be single monoliths, but should be decoupled (separated) along domain boundaries into different components (containers/micro-services), each with a distinct responsibility.

ELASTICITY
Scaling out and scaling in depending on the rate of requests or any other metrics, modern applications can help optimise costs without missing business opportunities

AUTOMATION
Integrations and deployments of modern applications must be automated to enable frequent, high-quality releases, independent of individual people. Modern applications should be deployed through continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.
Rapid release of high quality features.

SECURITY
Most companies lack a modern app development and security mindset. In a legacy mindset of app development, security, like some kind of afterthought, is typically postponed to the last stages of app development, implementing security measures when an application is already deployed to production. It’s like constructing a house with paper-thin walls and then trying to secure it with a strong fence. Security should be embedded in every phase of design and development.

RESILIENCY
Application resilience is the ability of an application to react to problems in one of its components and still provide the best possible service (aka system’s ability to recover from failures and continue to function). Resiliency has become more important as organizations continue to rapidly implement software across multi-tier, multiple technology infrastructures. If an application encounters a failure when it calls an external data source, it should retry or otherwise handle the exception—not become unresponsive—while continuing to operate with a graceful degradation of functionality.

Technologies mentioned: Docker, Kubernetes, AWS/Azure Container Services, Serverless, Elastic Load Balancing, Automation, DevSecOps, Security-in-the-cloud, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Terraform.