An Intellyx BrainBlog for WSO2, by Jason English
Cloud native engineers create and scale digital services with greater agility than their conventional application development counterparts, by leveraging modern cloud paradigms.
The combination of decoupled logic and infrastructure, ephemeral microservices and elastically scaling architecture offers incredible business value – but only for the lucky companies that can afford the technical resources to build and support this new delivery paradigm.
Even the most sophisticated enterprises often hit a wall in attempting the leap to cloud native transformation, as they try to surmount a high technical bar. Simply throwing more IT budget and resources at the problem never seems to create enough automation to sustainably accelerate delivery speed and quality, as newer, rapidly changing services must be layered atop critical existing systems.
Success in cloud native development requires the orchestration of a massive array of moving parts, of course, but also the tightly coordinated choreography of several talented individual players.
Who will arrange the cloud native movement?
“There’s constant change in the technology, then constant change in the requirements, and a constant change in the environment. It’s hard for developers and humans generally, to keep up with all these changes that are occurring at a perhaps even faster and faster pace,” said Eric Newcomer, CTO of WSO2 in a recent podcast.
“Is it an individual activity, a craft? Or is it somebody creating an interface that plugs into another interface, that uses a container that gets deployed in Kubernetes? We are getting to that point where we can also introduce more automation… but automation at the same time brings its own level of complexity,” Newcomer continued.
Automation of infrastructure as code is a core tenet of cloud native computing. The ability to instantly spin up containerized workloads and orchestrate them to meet the computing needs of applications is essential, with automation enabling engineers to surpass the speed boundaries of human-driven manual deployments by a thousandfold or more.
Unfortunately, the proliferation of so many microservices, each with their own security, API interfaces, and addressing settings is also breaking the barriers of development attention to compose and orchestrate this complex, interdependent dance of ephemeral architecture.
Recent US labor statistics point out that we are now experiencing a shortage of nearly 1.5 million unfilled computer science-related positions, with only 400,000 new CS graduates coming onto the job market every year.
These sobering statistics point out that we must seek out untapped sources of talent from unconventional sources to keep up with the enterprise demand for new digital services.
Can low-code provide a lift?
A huge market for low-code development tools has leapt into prominence over the last decade, with vendors seeking to ease the technical burdens of delivering customer-facing applications.
Unlike ‘no-code’ tools which should require zero actual coding, or ‘pro-code’ tools that cater to developers coding within the IDE, low-code provides some helpful user interfaces and visual workflows for designing user experiences while abstracting away integration complexities with declarative models – therefore requiring less coding work.
Low-code tools have already shown great traction in accelerating the delivery of new customer-facing functionality on mobile devices and in browsers. Even non-developers can apply their business expertise and get in on the act, by designing user experiences and simply hooking up adapted data services and sources.
However, due to the high technical bar, most low-code tools are too simplistic to assist developers in hand-coding the dance of infrastructure integration within the cloud native development paradigm – until now.
A Digital PaaS for both roles
A next generation of digital platform is arising to help resource-constrained development teams.
WSO2’s recently released Choreo Digital Platform as a Service (or Digital PaaS) abstracts away the cloud native infrastructure complexity of composing, securing, and delivering API-driven applications at production-ready scale.
Choreo’s foundation rests upon the open-source Ballerina language and runtime, which can simultaneously represent HTTP-based integration calls (and other types of APIs) as code, as well as in sequence diagrams that visually represent the distributed synchronous and asynchronous interactions that exist within that code.
Developers can declaratively build digital services faster with the help of intuitive graphical interfaces and workflows, with less coding and less maintenance. Business experts can get involved and see the same code in a graphical workflow light, and thereby understand the declarative functionality of cloud native apps without the high technical bar.
Intellyx President Jason Bloomberg summed this phenomenon up in a recent whitepaper titled Managing Complexity for Cloud Native Applications (or, ‘Winning the Cloud Native Complexity Shell Game’):
“By introducing a cloud native programming model centering on the HTTP architectural pattern, Ballerina shifts the complexity away from protocol-centric challenges to the broader architectural considerations that drive the creation of high-quality, scalable cloud native applications…
“Putting best practice principles instead of simple functionality at the heart of its offering, Choreo helps developers, engineers, architects, integration specialists, and the rest of the extended cloud native application team shift to the new paradigm of integration-centric cloud native application development.”
The Intellyx Take
A modern digital PaaS should blur the lines between app dev, integration, and security, and democratize participation in delivering digital experiences without excessive technical overhead. WSO2’s Choreo offers a platform for both developers and business experts to get their arms around the complexity of building and deploying API-driven cloud native applications.
One bright spot of encouragement amidst our current technical resource challenge is knowing that developers consider themselves to be largely self-taught – most would say they learned more than 80 percent or more of their current skills on the job, rather than through formal computer science training.
Therefore, low-code capabilities can provide easier onramps for less technical team members to get a leg up on their own cloud native career journey, while also helping ‘pro-code’ skilled developers offload some of their hand-coded integrations and business logic to other teams, so they can focus on deeper differentiation.
© 2022, Intellyx LLC. Intellyx controls the content of this document. At the time of publishing, WSO2 is an Intellyx customer. Image source, 2016 Lillihammer Youth Olympics, flickr CC 2.0 license.
