Home > Application fleet robustness and resilience: strategic imperatives to protect and grow business
Home > Application fleet robustness and resilience: strategic imperatives to protect and grow business
Home > Application fleet robustness and resilience: strategic imperatives to protect and grow business
How the IT team can ensure the provision of robust and resilient systems and applications that can ensure business continuity.
Maintaining an application fleet that meets the requirements for robustness and resilience is a crucial strategic priorityfor business protection and growth. When we talk about robustness and resilience, we refer to two distinct aspects that affect a system's ability to cope with problems , and ensure reliable operation over time.
An application fleet that does not meet robustness and resilience requirements creates a fragile environment, where even small failures and unforeseen events can have devastating ripple effects on the business. There can be many reasons why this situation arises:
Technology risk can become a risk to the entire company to the point of:
In an environment where applications must be increasingly reliable and available, IT must be able to provide the business with assurances that applications remain operational under all circumstances and can recover quickly when a failure occurs.
Many organizations are looking at low-code as a solution for ensuring resilience and robustness: faster development and iteration times (thus also more testing opportunities), use of predefined and pre-prepared blocks of built-in monitoring and exception handling mechanisms, and the ability to centrally manage and automate updates for the components used, since the underlying code is managed by the low-code platform itself.
his last point, the fact that applications can continue to run without interruption even after an update, is a key issue nowadays. Recall the Crowdstrike case, where a faulty update caused a global outage: this underscores how crucial it is to have an update system that can ensuredeploying continuityeven during patching or update processes.
The risk associated withusing low-code platforms is related not so much to production - which is greatly simplified because of graphical interfaces and predefined components that can be assembled without the need to write large amounts of code manually - but to process design and integrations.
At WEGG we are experienced consultants in analyzing business processes, in order to optimize them:
In our scouting of low-code technologies we identified Mendix platform, owned by Siemens, as the best choice. Mendix offers built-in features that provide robustness and resilience by design. It has been recognized in Gartner's quadrant for the seventh consecutive year as one of the top low-code platforms in the market and also provides vertical solutions for industries that require high complexity, such as finance, manufacturing and healthcare.
Creating robust and resilient applications with Mendix
Let's take an order management system as an example: a traditional, monolithic architecture makes the rapid changes required to keep up with a changing business environment is difficult, if not impossible. Frequent increases in demand, the need to update the software quickly, sometimes in real time, the ability to manage queue size or duration before it becomes a problem, and the capacity to recover quickly if a server goes down... these are all elements that affect the business model and its ability to meet user demands and expectations.
Alternative development methods such as low-code are certainly effective when it comes to moving faster and preparing the organization for the future, but they must have native robustness and resilience capabilities in order to re-architect monolithic systems into more modern microservice architectures. Creating and replicating this network of applications is much easier than traditional programming and duplication.
But the advantage of Mendix is that it can regularly manage and optimize these microservices without downtime thanks to CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery) capabilities which enable automated and well-tested application deployments. To put it simply, changes can be made without affecting the rest of the environment, as all that’s needed is to deploy the updated application. What are the benefits?
Mendix's native Version Control also provides traceability in managing code versions. Any changes to the code can be easily recovered in the event of a problem: so this affects both application stability and operational resilience because it facilitates roll-back to an earlier, working version.
A key differentiator of Mendix is its modular infrastructure, which allows the creation of independent modules, each benefiting of the high availability and disaster recovery capabilities provided by the platform, without the need to add additional layers of manual management. This means that both microservices and larger applications, deployed as a series of modules, are protected by these resilience solutions.
In addition, as we have already mentioned, each module can be upgraded or deployed automatically and securely, with business continuity plans integrating HA/DR strategies. This ensures that modules are available, easily recoverable in case of failure, and can be updated without compromising the resilience of the entire system.
A path to overhaul one's architectures in order to provide greater assurance of robustness and resilience goes through an analysis of the inputs/outputs and processes that one wants to optimize , and deploying a network of applications configured ad hoc on Mendix technology. The platform's native capabilities ensure high availability and rapid recovery in case of unforeseen events. Remember that the CI/CD pipeline also enables proactive management of any issues, allowing updates and revisions to be made without disrupting the system while it’s running.
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