Some weeks ago I posted an infograph about the cloud-enabled company. Since then I had many good discussions about it and put additional thoughts into the concept. This finally ended in an updated infograph:
- I extended the cloud- and service architecture with an implementation approach, which is of course: Agile. This includes vision, prioritized backlog, sprinting and so on.
- The concept of microservices was added, which seems to me one of the next “big things” and finally brings SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) to the ground. You can basically build every service out of a combination of microservices – sourced through the cloud or self-made, as long as it meets the requirements of a microservice. And the “Internet of Things”? A big swarm of microservices.
- I realized that agile, the cloud and the robust architecture of microservices are the enablers for Continuos Integration and Continuos Delivery, including automated testing. This allowed me to integrate these DevOps concepts into the infograph.
So here’s the updated graph:
Sounds to you like crazy stuff for the future? No, it’s not. It’s reality and actually nothing complicated. I was recently on a long bus ride with a good friend, who works as an architect for a leading PaaS cloud provider. Long bus rides can be something really boring, but not this time: We discussed my ‘old’ infograph and he gave me an impressive demonstration what is possible with a few mouse-clicks: Instantly getting a development platform through the cloud, modelling a simple mortage loan process on it (using BPMN), for some steps you can buy appropriate microservices on the cloud market, some you have to make your own microservice. Once finished, this went automatically through some tests and gates – and was pushed to production. Needless to say that nothing was locally on the laptop, this was done completely through the internet browser, connected via an iPhone.