Objectivity’s Thought Leadership Day — Tackling the Latest Technology Trends

At Objectivity, we believe that breaking silos from different technical disciplines and sharing knowledge between our community of practices is a key enabler for inspiration and the convergence of ideas. Solutions born in such an environment can make a huge impact on our and our customers’ business. Thus, we regularly organise Thought Leadership (TL) Day, during which our lead cloud, data, frontend, AI, productivity and delivery technologists present the most interesting findings and experiences from their daily jobs and the market research they conduct.

Below you’ll find a summary of insights from our last TL day, which took place last month. It was a day filled with fascinating discussions about the latest technology trends, which lasted a total of 6 hours and allowed us to cover 8 important topics.

Domain-Driven Design (DDD)

We’re quite adept at software delivery and this leads us to the conclusion that coding is the easiest part of the delivery process. Defining the problem and designing the product or solution is something we consider to be much more critical. We found that adopting the DDD toolkit (context mapping, event storming, Wardley’s maps) allows us to smoothly transition into the implementation phase and to deliver value to both businesses and end users.

Data Mesh

Being a data-driven organisation is the ultimate goal of companies on their digital transformation journey. We've seen many companies struggling to find the right approach and architecture, looking for the holy grail of data. We think that the new approach, called Data Mesh Principles and Logical Architecture might be an answer. We expect that a growing number of companies will be adopting it. Collecting early adopters’ experiences in this area over the next couple of months is necessary to validate whether this is truly the right direction. 

Multicloud

We've observed that our customers would like to have various choices to choose from in terms of the cloud. They believe that single-cloud hosting poses a certain degree of vendor lock-in risk. Sometimes, they see it as a constraint on adopting the latest trends and newly emerging cloud services. At the same time, they also expect to unlock the potential of their on-premise workloads and to connect them to cloud native solutions. We anticipate that the Kubernetes ecosystem (and in general CNCF Cloud Native Interactive Landscape) will grow significantly and that the adoption of Azure Arc, AWS Outpost and Google Anthos for hybrid scenarios will increase as well.

Automation in Development

We decided to carefully track all the initiatives around automated testing, coding and infrastructure provisioning. And, perhaps it won’t happen tomorrow, but we think that low-code isn’t the last station on the journey to more efficient software development. Open AI GPT-3 code generation models (1) are giving us a taste of what such code generation might eventually look like. Cloud Maker projects are also quite likely to become a useful development tool.

Static Site Generation

Content that’s dynamic but safe from being compromised. Characterised by high performance but hosted on a simple runtime environment. And SEO friendly. Sounds interesting? Static Site Generation reverses the paradigm of website creation and rendering and transfers all the hard pieces from runtime into the delivery and building pipeline. We find this to be a very interesting trend, especially when combined with Headless CMS/eCommerce solutions, which have generally been performing under a heavy load during COVID-19.

Flutter to Rule Them All

Two years ago, we noticed great potential in Flutter. Since then, we’ve successfully adopted it in many of our mobile projects and continue to propose it as the default solution — even when customers expect their applications to provide a native user experience. We believe that this is just the beginning of this approach’s ubiquity. The adoption of Flutter will continue to rapidly increase, especially after the announcement that web support is now production-ready and desktop support is available in a stable channel under an early release flag. We anticipate that many customers will appreciate the possibility to address almost all platforms (mobile, web, desktop) with one code baseline and only have to pay for it once.

Sometimes Citizen Development is Good Enough

As engineers, we think like engineers, so perhaps we have a natural tendency to treat low-code platforms (e.g. Power Platform) like any other delivery platform. Deployment automation, continuous integration, and code versioning are some of the practices we apply by default. While this is still the right approach for mission critical systems delivered on low-code platforms, we observe that in many cases citizen development and click-based solutions work just fine and are resilient enough to bring great operational efficiency benefits. O365, Power Automate, App, Desktop RPA Flows — keeping such ecosystems sustainable is a challenge, although proper governance over the citizen development community, which naturally has the buy-in to contribute to the maintenance of their own solutions, might be the key to success. We expect the number of such scenarios to grow and, in fact, we’re currently supporting a couple of them.

Policy and Infrastructure as Code

Cloud infrastructure is no different than the other areas software engineers are interested in, so software development practices are also being widely adopted for infrastructure provisioning.

Although Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is not a new concept and is, in fact, the foundation of mature DevOps solutions, it has one important caveat — it can make cloud infrastructure exposed to developers’ boldness and neglect, especially in terms of security and costs. Fortunately, all major cloud providers delivered services, which allow for the application of a policy layer over developers’ actions and provisioning scripts. This policy puzzle helps to close the gap between the full implementation of the DevSecOps concept. Defining actions and provisioning scripts as code guarantees much greater control, making policies more testable, transparent and automatically deployable. We believe this optimisation arrived right on time, as IaC frameworks that support multicloud (e.g. Terraform) have become more popular, which has broadened their impact.

Summary

At Objectivity, we believe that tracking and discussing the latest technology trends is extremely important. However, we also understand that this is just the beginning. The true art is the art of the possible, as innovation matters only if it brings value to our customers. If you’d like to discuss these or any other trends and to check what’s possible in your business, please don’t hesitate to contact us.