According to Gartner, “As business needs change, organizations must be able to deliver innovation quickly and adapt applications dynamically — reassembling capabilities from inside and outside the enterprise. To do this, organizations must understand and implement the ‘composable enterprise.’”
This is an appealing concept for companies looking for a good balance between highly centralized and highly distributed technologies and information systems.
For enterprise IT, the use of composable infrastructure - built up of independent components that can be swapped out when needed - is already widely applied. Another place to look for the advantages of composability: business process automation (BPM). Why? Because CIOs are facing a number of pressures:
- Business teams need responsiveness and speed from IT as everyone continues to look for ways to maximize go-to-market.
- Current business process automation platforms deploy applications that are all dependent on shared resources. The DevOps team must take interoperability and integration among a group of applications using shared resources into consideration for new developments, new deployments, and maintenance. This can be complex, time consuming and can require extensive testing before updates can be deployed.
- Similarly, whenever the process application platform is upgraded to a new version to take advantage of new features, or when maintenance on a single application is needed, all applications are affected, and the need to offline and upgrade everything can impose a high cost in downtime.
- Scaling grouped business process applications can add unnecessary cost as it is applied across the board even if not all of those applications need to be scaled.
The approach of building business applications from interoperable elements promises to address some of these key issues.
Modularity and component-based systems have already been successfully applied for many years in IT and software development. Infrastructures are composed; we no longer buy machines but CPU, memory, disk space, bandwidth, and so on. In software development we see composability applied through containerization, an approach that is already widely used and becoming the standard for DevOps teams, as shown for example by the growing use of platforms such as Docker and Kubernetes.
“Self-contained applications” are setting the same trend for composable BPM process-based applications. BPM technologies already fit perfectly into the approach of composable architectures. Applications themselves are also already internally made up of composable elements: processes, sub-processes, connectors, services, reusable pieces of code, business rules, and UI widgets to name a few.
The approach of Self-Contained Applications combines the benefits of containerization approaches and technologies with the power of BPM application platform technologies for application development. The BPM base offers wide extensibility to integrate with enterprise IT, with good auditability, traceability, and compliance; deployment of individual applications using containers offers faster delivery, portability, and easier management.
With Self-Contained Applications, DevOps teams can deploy complex applications more easily, deliver continuously, and thus support innovation and faster time to market. Each Self-Contained Application can be deployed individually, independently, and fast to deliver increased value through improvements as quickly as the business requires.
CIOs and the technical teams they are responsible for will be happy to see Self-Contained Applications because:
- The containerized approach included with Self-Contained Applications is already familiar to CIOs and their technical teams.
- The less complex, independent development and deployment of Self-Contained Applications means faster application delivery to production overall. As it’s not necessary to take interoperability and integration among a group of applications into account during development, development is faster, testing is easier, and the resulting application is easier to maintain.
- Scaling an independent application is simpler, and it can be applied to each application individually.
- Application maintenance costs are reduced, as smaller and more regular updates are now possible.
- Because it’s easier to implement multiple projects - development teams’ efficiency and productivity, and therefore ROI, increase.
Business will be happy to see Self-Contained Applications because:
- Automation and business application projects are more easily adapted to business changes; the IT team can respond more quickly and with more confidence due to the smaller scope and less interdependence among other applications.
- Faster innovation and competitive advantage offers a faster response to new business needs.
- The business team has better control of the planned maintenance / downtime schedule as each Self-Contained App is no longer dependent on a shared platform schedule.
Learn more about Self-Contained Applications with Bonita here.
