By Glenn Gruber, Anexinet

Delivering Real Time Applications Drives the March Towards Microservices

Business, like life, is a series of successes and failures. Hopefully of course we have more successes than failures. However, most of the systems that we created over the past several decades are really designed around a rather ideal set of circumstances - how we would like and expect things to unfold. But since the world isn't quite so nice and neat as we'd like, we need to change how we operate and as a result we need to enhance the platforms we use to run the business.

Accelerating this trend is the ever-rising customer expectations, sometimes referred to as the Amazon effect. We are no longer content to get just free shipping, if it doesn't arrive in 2 days, we get annoyed. We want immediate gratification. This is just the simplest example, but one that we can probably all relate to.

With mobile technologies, the cloud, the Internet of Things, customers, employees, partners all expect us to react to their desires and challenges in near real time. And for many, this is the crux of our Digital Transformation efforts - how can we re-design, re-platform, re-engineer business processes to be more reactive to internal and external events?

This isn't a new question, but maybe we've got new answers. One major enabling trend is the move to Event Driven Architectures. And they are pretty much what they sound like - in an Event Driven Architecture, when an event occurs, it can set off a reaction that follows your specified rules and workflow to achieve a range of objectives.

• An IoT sensor in a manufacturing plant sends data to a predictive algorithm which identifies a part is about to fail and alerts the maintenance to fix it pre-emptively and maintain optimal uptime
• A newly married couple wants to buy a house and fills out a mortgage application online. The EDA triggers a Robotic Process Automation system to evaluate the loan application and sends the approval back in under 15 minutes.
• A new order comes in and the system identifies a shortage in a few items in the Bill of Materials and initiates the re-order
  

And with an EDA in place, microservices make it easier to add new capabilities to the organization. Event-driven applications are typically nonlinear and asynchronous, which makes them more adaptable. This enables components to function independently, allowing them to couple and decouple into networks, and be used and reused many times over. Marrying these two architectural trends will help build composite applications and deliver new, more responsive capabilities to the enterprise in an agile fashion. As more data comes into the organization we can rapidly incorporate them into existing business processes.

This also dovetails nicely into another exiting trend --- machine learning. What we're able to do with data - traditional structured/unstructured data, and now images, video and audio - is expanding at a rapid pace and is going to create a raft of new inputs and triggers for our event-driven architectures.

I expect a lot companies to begin investing in, or at least investigating event-driven architectures and microservices ion 2020 and that those that do will have a significant leg up on their competition.

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About the Author

Glenn Gruber is a Senior Digital Strategist at Anexinet. He leads enterprise mobile strategy engagements to help companies determine the best way to integrate mobile into their business -- both from a consumer-facing perspective, but also how to leverage mobile to empower employees to be more productive and improve service delivery through the intelligent use of mobile devices and contextual intelligence. Glenn has helped a wide range of enterprises on how to leverage mobile within their business including Bank of Montreal, Dubai Airports, Carnival Cruise Line and Merck. He is a leading voice in the travel sector as a contributing Node to Tnooz where he writes about how mobile and other emerging technologies are impacting the travel sector and a frequent speaker at industry events.