Application fleet robustness and resilience: strategic imperatives to protect and grow business

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.  

• The Robustness refers to the ability of an application to function properly even in the presence of abnormal conditions or unforeseen events internal to the system itself. It's an internal factor because it concerns how the system is designed and implemented: it is related to code quality, exception handling, and the system's ability to minimiza the impact of internal failures. In summary, we can say that a robust application is "strong inside": therefore, it can handle internal errors (such as bugs, invalid memory accesses), withstand failures (e.g., partial failures of some software components), and behave predictably in the presence of abnormal input conditions.

• The resilience on the other hand refers to the application's ability to recover from adverse external eventsand continue to function acceptably by restoring functionality and minimizing down-time. External events can be of various types: hardware failures (power outage, servers suddenly going down), network problems, cyber-attacks, request overload but also unforeseeable contingencies such as natural disasters or adverse operating conditions. Resilience is an external factorin that it depends on the system's interaction with its environment. In summary, we can say that a resilient application system not only avoids failures but is able to “bounce back” and recover a functionality after a critical event.  

   

Ignoring these issues creates technological, but more importantly, business risk 

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:  

• the fact that there are ated applications in one's IT environment (and therefore not designed to handle modern requirements in terms of scalability, security, reliability) and that it is difficult to ensure that they are maintained and updated. This is tied closely with budget and technical resources available: there are often time, cost, and resource constraints that do not allow you to embark on application renewal projects 

• the fact that applications are part of complex architectures and integrations: the interdependence of components, if not managed properly, creates a ripple effect that can damage the entire ecosystem. A traditional, let's say monolithic, approach makes it more difficult to isolate problems and scale individual modules. This risk is reduced with modern microservice architectures, which allow applications to be broken down into smaller, independent, easily maintained components.

Technology risk can become a risk to the entire company to the point of: 

• damaging revenue streams: disruptions or problems can reduce the company's ability to generate revenue 

• damage corporate reputation: if the company is not perceived by customers and partners as reliable and able to provide continuous services without glitches there is reputational damage 

• halt business operations to the point of compromising production itself

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.  

How we can prevent systems from collapsing like paper castles

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.