Cloud based technologies have been revolutionizing the ways in which enterprise applications are deployed. Along with Continuous Integration/Continuous development methodology which goes by the name of Devops, the full ‘tool chain’ of application development, starting from its agile development practices   to packaging, deployment, configuration and monitoring have acquired a sense of seamless daily flow, wherein applications undergo daily changes and get deployed, without so much as an end user of the application ever needing to know of the changes made.

Be that as it may, there is a clear convergence seen between a host of technologies which may impact everything related to enterprise software development methods, costs, business models etc., for both companies developing the enterprise software and those who adopt them.

Cloud deployed Applications at platform level (PaaS) or even at the more comprehensive and lower-level Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) can now be integrated with Application development, delivery, and deployment on a daily basis. By using Devops methods, daily application builds can be made, and ‘orchestrated’ to be deployed on Cloud based containers or virtual servers.  In this way, the deployed applications can be managed for any scale of changes, speed of deployment and efficiency of deployment.

 A future scenario that can be envisioned is full-blown automated enterprise software development ‘tool chain’, which takes ‘meaningful’ inputs from its background AI engine running on customer usage patterns and market ideas, converts them into application features or changes by daily builds using Devops methods, and then   deploys them on containers or virtual servers using automated container orchestration systems like Kubernetes. The ideas of AI should get converted into customer solution development on the fly, as required. The conventional Software development lifecycle involving analysing needs , converting to software specifications, development cycles, testing cycles and deploying takes longer time and increasingly becoming non-feasible.

A virtual software lab with needs and requirements provided by AI/ML is converted into business solution with applicable integration and testing . A product manager ( which can also be a robot) can signoff based on the solution envisaged. The platform should be a set of tools and workflow which can take the design inputs and use the right technology /software tools to develop this . The needs of customer are unlimited and the tools within the platform can visualize and roll out in a quicker time frame . The tools of deployment and technology should be embedded within the platform with AI/ML capability . The ultimate result is a set of business solutions being rolled out to customers based on their needs and demands.

Since Banks invariably deal with Enterprise applications, there is a compelling case to completely ditch the legacy and monolith applications and redesign them for containerization or virtualization as the case maybe. Containers especially lend themselves to loosely coupled microservices, where the entire enterprise application can be split into modular client server architecture-based microservices and deployed daily and automatically on containers.  The move to microservices and container-based architecture may likely make banking software enormously flexible, scalable, efficient to develop, deploy and monitor.

A containerized application is neatly modularized both in design and implementation because each module can be split into instances of standalone microservices deployed on efficiently managed containers that talk to each other using API’s provided by the container orchestrating engine like Kubernetes. Plus, daily automated builds using Devops methods and deployment using orchestration eliminates the drudgery associated with configuring and deploying with traditional manual or batch script-based deployment paradigm.

While every bank has to necessarily embrace these disruptive technologies to stay in the game, for the enterprise software developing company this is both an opportunity and challenge.  While moving or deploying the monolithic application as such on Cloud can be achieved with not many changes to existing architecture, leveraging the full power of containerization will likely require complete revamp of enterprise architecture into standalone microservices that can be deployed on Cloud across containers.

Daily builds, Automation, and Containerization are the future of enterprise application development and deployment. While this makeover is largely a technology and business model change, it will help banks go a long way on the path of modernization and digitization.