You are a digital manager in a large company. Your job often requires you to make an acrobatic leap between market requirements and technological innovations. Not easy to keep up with everything!

In particular, you have a set of business applications that were developed several years ago. The oldest ones have been running for a good ten years and no longer meet their performance objectives and their user experience leaves much to be desired. Even worse, they cost a fortune! They are running on an oversized server and at the slightest performance problem, the IT department sends you numerous quotes to "put in more VMs".

It is in front of your dismay that your new colleague from IT, comes to suggest: "Have you thought about containerizing this application? Or even switching to serverless and following a JamStack architecture powered by microservices?".

In order not to lose face, you lock yourself in your office with a thermos of coffee and try to climb this mountain of obscure vocabulary. That's when you come across an article from Smile that sheds some light on the subject.

More abstraction for more business

The crisis of the covid has only accentuated this state of affairs: organizations must become more agile to adapt to potentially abrupt structural changes. Agility, an often overused term, refers here to business agility: being able to respond quickly to new market demands and innovations launched by competitors.

To do this, tools and methods are multiplying, with a strong underlying theme: the cloud. The cloud allows us to move towards ever greater abstraction, dispense with machines and finally concentrate on the business. Abstraction, of course, but how?

• Via "containers", an abstraction unit whose objective is to reduce the dependencies of your application with its infrastructure (the servers in short).

• Via "serverless" approaches that aim to get rid of the very notion of infrastructure.

• Via new architectures such as "JamStack" which go as far as to get rid of the notion of the back office to make it only a convenience.

Step n°1: containers

In a nutshell, containerization consists of "encapsulating" code and all its dependencies in a standardized way that can be understood by third-party cloud services so that it can run on any infrastructure (even on an AS400!).

Kubernetes, the most popular containerization solution on the market, orchestrates and manages containers in the cloud. It's a solution that remains independent, which means your developers are free to choose different programming languages and frameworks while remaining independent of the cloud provider.

Step n°2: serverless

Serverless is a model in which the cloud provider will execute a piece of code by dynamically providing the resources.

The code can be executed in containers (see the previous paragraph, do you follow?) that can be triggered by various events that do not require servers to run continuously: alerts, web requests, execution of calculations, events around data ... The main advantage: you are only charged for the number of resources used to execute the code in question! No more invoices from your IT department to buy more virtual machines.

Step n°3: the Jamstack 

Nothing to do with jam: Jamstack is a technology stack for building websites with J.A.M for Javascript, API and Markup.

Perhaps you remember the static websites that you had to code directly to update? Jamstack takes this principle by pre-building the site in the form of static HTML pages while making it dynamic via Javascript functions and relying on API flows to access content and services.

Jamstack brings two strong advantages to your application:

• Strengthen security: static pages no longer directly expose technical information with potential security holes (databases & servers). They become extremely difficult to hack!

• Improve performance - static pages are very light to load - and through performance, SEO. Jamstack architectures allow a page to load up to six times faster.
   

Very good, I understood everything! But what's next?

We are convinced that these three steps can help you modernize your digital applications. And then? You just have to go straight to the fourth step! Write to us at contact@smile.fr!

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