Application Development in 2024: Are You MAD Already?

As organisations strive to become more agile and cloud-native, adapting our development approaches to this new reality is crucial. In the fast-paced world of technology, what’s modern today may be outdated tomorrow. Each decision we make today must be considered more carefully than ever before.

Modern Application Development (MAD) encompasses the practice of creating scalable, agile, and cloud-native software. This blog will explore the essential components of MAD, including architecture, platform choices, tooling, and the impact of AI, ensuring you stay ahead in this ever-evolving landscape.

What is Modern Application Development?

Modern Application Development (MAD) involves creating software that is scalable, agile, and cloud-native. It embraces new technologies, practices, and frameworks, adapting to the rapidly changing software development landscape. Unlike traditional development, which often focuses on monolithic structures and on-premises infrastructure, MAD prioritises modularity, flexibility, and cloud integration.

Architecture and Platform Choices

When considering modern architecture for application development, the plethora of choices can be overwhelming. To navigate these choices effectively, consider the following areas:

Microservices Architecture

Consider building a microservices’ architecture, a modern application is highly scalable and such an architecture allows you to achieve that. In doing so, you open up a can of possibilities, allowing you to further optimise your application and cloud infrastructure. Some properties of a microservices’ architecture are:

• Flexibility and Scalability: Microservices offer greater flexibility and scalability.
• Service-Oriented Design: Design everything as a service and expose functionalities through APIs. This allows you to create clear constructs and boundaries between components in your architecture.
• Serverless Adoption: A good microservices architecture allows you to use serverless technology. This brings in the ability to focus on business logic without worrying about infrastructure.

Leveraging Cloud Platforms

Use cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud to provide the necessary infrastructure for modern applications. These platforms not only offer almost infinite scalability and reliability. They also come included with all the nuts and bolts you need for your application in the form of managed services for everything from databases, storage to security and CI/CD.

Development Tools

• Programming Languages: The choice of programming language is crucial. JavaScript (or TypeScript) is popular for frontend and backend development, but Java, Python, C#, and Go are also viable options and may better suit your needs.
• Frameworks and Libraries: Your choice of language will influence your framework and library choices (e.g., Next.js, Spring Boot, Flask, Django). Selecting the right framework and libraries will improve your development velocity, but you need to keep an eye out constantly on your “bill-of-material” for security and licensing issues.
• IDE: With the likes of Visual Studio Code and everything from Jetbrains the world of IDE’s has never been more advanced and competitive. These tools, or rather toolboxes, allow you to write code more efficiently with basic features like syntax highlighting and formatting but also introduce new AI capabilities for automatic code generation.

Deployment Tools

• Containers: Containers are a reliable choice for deployment, ensuring consistency across different environments. In addition to containers, consider using orchestration tools like Kubernetes to manage containerized applications at scale.
• CI/CD: With CI/CD you can ensure that all the automation for integration (testing and scanning) and deployment is handled, consistently and reproducible. Ensuring a higher standard of quality.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): the modern approach to set up your infrastructure as programmable objects. The tooling around this subject allows you to design, deploy and change your infrastructure through code, allowing you to be more consistent between your development and production environments.

Development in the Age of AI

The “AIlephant” in the room cannot be ignored. AI and machine learning are becoming integral parts of modern application development, offering new ways to enhance and optimise applications. Incorporating AI can lead to smarter applications, improved decision-making processes, and enhanced user experiences. But it also allows us to write code faster and more efficiently with the likes of Copilot and ChatGPT. Although the output may not be 100% perfect and could contain issues, it allows for greater velocity.

Additionally, AI is proving invaluable for writing test cases. AI-driven tools can analyse code, detect potential vulnerabilities, and automatically generate comprehensive test cases, ensuring thorough coverage and reducing the likelihood of bugs. These tools can learn from past codebases and predict where issues might arise, crafting test cases that address both common and edge scenarios. By incorporating AI in testing, developers can identify issues earlier in the development cycle, leading to more robust and reliable software.

On the other side, it requires you, or rather your developers, to invest more time in reviewing and testing, which is often a more complex task than simply writing code, requiring more experience. However, with AI assisting in generating and managing test cases, this process can be streamlined, allowing developers to focus on refining and optimizing the code rather than spending excessive time on manual testing.

Staying Informed

The biggest challenge in MAD is staying informed. All the hyperscalers introduce new features on a regular basis, and methodologies evolve continuous. Staying updated is therefore crucial for success.

Here are some strategies:

• Regularly Follow Tech News: Subscribe to updates from cloud providers and tech news outlets.
• Participate in Webinars and Conferences: Engage with the community and learn from industry leaders.
• Continuous Learning: Invest in training and certifications to keep up with the latest trends and technologies.

In conclusion, the key to thriving in modern application development is making informed and timely decisions. As the technology landscape rapidly evolves, adapting to new methodologies and tools is essential. Don’t sit idle; stay proactive in learning and adopting modern practices.