The days when product development took years are long gone. Today, in the era of cloud and massive digitalization, development has to be extremely quick. As businesses are expected to deliver more with less, there is immense pressure on development teams to accelerate the development cycle and optimize the delivery process. While demands are increasing on one end, there is a perineal shortage of skilled developers on the other end. What does this mean for cloud-native development? How can companies speed up their development and delivery outcomes? How does the low-code paradigm fit into the larger scheme of things? Read on to find out!
The rise of cloud-native development
Several trends have engulfed businesses at large today. One of them is cloud-native technology, which is being touted as the future of enterprise IT, allowing organizations to accelerate and automate the application development journey. This technology is quickly becoming a primary driver of innovation, as it helps organizations in creating new business opportunities and fundamentally changing end-user experience and satisfaction.
Embracing a cloud-native app architecture allows enterprises to make the most of all the benefits of cloud technology – including faster delivery and better reliability – while balancing the robustness and resilience that are needed for business-critical applications. Since provisioning and de-provisioning of resources are done on an on-demand or self-service manner, they help in meeting application requirements in a dynamic fashion – without having to reinvent the wheel for basic application infrastructure services.
But as cloud-native development becomes popular, a responsibly designed cloud-native architecture requires the perfect amalgamation of reusable components, role-based access, and change control – all of which needs to be defined by zero-trust policies to avoid functional setbacks as well as security breaches.
Pairing cloud-native with low code
Building cloud-native applications that can truly scale on demand to meet evolving customer needs requires careful coordination between automated environments and API calls. Thankfully, low-code platforms offer the ideal foundation for developers looking to build extendible cloud-native applications. By offering the ability to spin up (or down) resources on demand and leverage highly-functional reusable components such as pre-built features and APIs, they help in building applications that exactly meet business needs while also enabling high levels of cost-efficiency.
Leveraging low code platforms to build cloud-native applications is a great way to enhance productivity and accelerate time-to-market. Through easy-to-use add-ons and drag and drop features, developers (and even non-developers) can quickly and easily build applications – without requiring high-level coding skills. Such development enables teams to focus on high-value tasks. Rather than spend time on resolving technical issues, it also empowers the entire organization to bring products to the market quickly.
Let’s look at some reasons that make cloud-native development with low-code a killer combination:
- Automate data models and workflows: Since the fundamental building blocks of low and no-code platforms are visual modeling tools, they help in automating data models and workflows. Since they can design workflows and specify data outputs – without worrying about the intricacy of the underlying infrastructure, teams can focus on coding new features, enabling integrations, and improving system resiliency – all while quickly visualizing code and coming up with solutions that are highly functional.
- Minimize complexity:When it comes to cloud-native applications, there are several moving parts to managing the architecture – far beyond the containers they orchestrate. By offering all possible components – from storage to metrics – a low-code approach helps in reducing the complexity of cloud-native development while enabling developers to build applications that are flexible and reliable.
- Prevent manual errors: Developers that use no-code platforms to generate cloud-native code can enjoy high levels of security. Since these platforms encapsulate frequent validation and security checks, they help maintain the quality of code – while also preventing manual errors and oversights.
- Enable reusability and extensibility: No code platforms offer reusable modules and components that can be composed dynamically. These reusable components and third-party tool integrations make it easy for developers to extend their existing cloud-native applications and scale them to meet growing demand.
- Speed up development cycle: Since low-code platforms enable coders to spin up complex applications – without having to write thousands of lines of code – they help accelerate the application development cycle by up to 10 times faster than traditional coding and empowers non-coders to create enterprise applications without the need to code.
- Ensure traceability and compliance: Low-code platforms offer end-to-end visibility into all the components and modules, often providing a single source of truth across the development organization. Such visibility not only helps in identifying and rectifying bottlenecks; it also paves the way for better traceability and compliance.
- Simplify cloud management:No-code/low code platforms also help simplify cloud management. Offering a simple, easy-to-use interface and a command-line utility to provision and manage development ecosystems, they help in creating high-quality code across cloud, edge, and other hybrid environments.
- Enable portability:Low code platforms are also great at enabling the portability of workloads between cloud vendors. Being platform-agnostic, they lead to lower integration issues while making it easy for developers to build, manage, and update code and meet the required standards for application design, scalability, security, and reliability.
Popular tools
There are several tools available in the market today that aid organizations in bringing their low-code dream to reality. For instance,
- Azure Logic Apps, a popular integration platform as a service (iPaaS) tool, delivers powerful capabilities to enable low code integration, allowing organizations to automate business-critical workflows while also improving scale and portability.
- Google AppSheetis another budding low-code tool that paves the way for rapid application development. Using AppSheet, teams can build powerful solutions with a simple click of a button and automate work – without having to write a single line of code.
- Airtableis another low-code platform that can be leveraged to build apps that connect data, workflows, and teams. By allowing teams to create solutions that align with business needs, the tool allows for faster agility and scale.
- AWS Step Functionsalso offers exceptional low-code capabilities for organizations that want to build distributed applications while also automating complex workflows. Teams can leverage the tool to build advanced machine learning pipelines that are not only reliable but also extremely fault-tolerant, while driving additional focus on business logic that matters.
In today’s age, where speed has become an unquestionable differentiator for businesses, low-code platforms are a big boon to cloud-native development. By automating laborious and mundane tasks, it makes room for smarter and faster software development and innovation – while allowing teams to accelerate time-to-market and supercharge their digital transformation initiatives.
