In this episode, Our customers depend on them, and our businesses depend on them. Without modern web apps, most businesses would not survive. I’ll present the first in a two part series on the principles for modernizing your enterprise web application. 

And then, what does any of this have to do with my son and his wage reporting application?

Links and More Information

The following are links mentioned in this episode, and links to related information:

• Modern Digital Applications Website (https://mdacast.com)
• Lee Atchison Articles and Presentations (https://leeatchison.com)
• Architecting for Scale, published by O’Reilly Media (https://architectingforscale.com)

Main Story - Five Principles for Modernizing Your Enterprise Web Applications

Modern web applications have a lot riding on them. Our customers depend on them, and our business depends on them. Without modern web applications, many businesses would not survive. Modern web applications must scale to meet our biggest needs without suffering outages or other availability issues. In order to meet and exceed this high bar, we must build, manage, and monitor our applications using modern principles, processes, and procedures.

There are five guiding principles that a modern application requires in order to meet these expectations. 

Principle #1 Using service-based architectures

Modern applications are large and complex, too complex to be handled as a single entity by a single team. Instead, multiple teams are required to develop, test, support, and operate these applications. This complex task is impossible when the application is a single monolith.

To handle a large complex application, split the application into multiple independent services. Then, you can assign different pieces of the application to different teams, allowing parallel development and operation.

By keeping modules isolated, they can be built, tested, and operated in isolation. Application problems can be more easily correlated and isolated to individual services, making it easier to decide which team should be called on to work on an issue when a problem arises.

Scaling is not just about the amount of traffic an application receives, but about the size and complexity of the application itself. Using service-based architectures makes scaling the application easier and allows larger and more complex applications to be dealt with reasonably.

In future segments, we will talk about the remaining four guiding principles that are required for enterprise applications to modernize. In the next segment, principle #2 is about team organization.

Our applications *are* getting more complex, and becoming more intertwined with the fundamental operation of our business. As such, the expectations of our customers are growing, and the demands for reliability, scalability, and functionality from management are keeping pace. Only by modernizing our applications can we make our applications meet the needs of our customers and our business.

Principle #2. Organize teams around services.

Architecting your application as a service-based application is only part of the answer to modernizing your enterprise systems. Once you have your application split up into services, it is essential that you structure your development teams around those services. It is critical that a single team owns each service.

And when I say “own”, I mean complete ownership...front to back...top to bottom.

This includes development, testing, operation, and support. All aspects of the development and operation of each service should be handled by one and only one team.

There is a model for...