Agile

An increased desire for rapid and scalable capability delivery has shifted focus to Cloud as an enabler of effective application development and deployment. The integration of Agile into a Cloud Native application life cycle process may not consistently allow an organization to more rapidly and reliably develop and scale applications. Product alignment concerns, and a lack of collaboration between operations and development teams, are often the primary culprits in today’s increasingly complex environments.

So how can we build, deliver, and operate resilient software systems more rapidly, at lower costs, and at scale to meet business requirements?

The answer may lie in an team’s ability to adopt an integrated approach combining Agile methods, application architecture decisions, and modifications to an organization’s core IT processes (depicted in figure below), in addition to organizational and cultural shifts. Teams should consider alignment of development staff to products, and infrastructure to offerings, optimizing resource allocation. A team’s capacity to execute these adjustments can significantly improve speed, scale, and resiliency objectives.

In the early phases of the lifecycle, organizations can incorporate thinking from a pattern perspective for better downstream outcomes (as seen in below) and each Agile phase should consider the use of architectural patterns. The piece of the puzzle many teams miss is that it’s not only important to think about pattern choices in the beginning, but also to carry them through the entire Agile methodology in every phase. Incorporating patterns in the requirements phase leads to better scalability (GateKeeper and Static Content Hosting), including pattern choices in code (Indexed Tables, Materialized view and Priority Queue), and pattern alignment with rapid deployment via automation.