Mark Makary Blog

Introduction

While I was at API World giving a talk on Reactive Microservices Architecture, it was obvious that, Reactive is gaining a lot of momentum within our technical audience, described by many as a very powerful and game changer set of architecture concepts, design patterns and technologies. However, many business stakeholders still wondering, how this is going to help the business, what is the business value or the RoI behind adopting Reactive Architecture?

It’s a very valid question, not just for Reactive but for any technical approach, as architects we should focus more on the business value rather than the cool factor.

“What is the business value of Reactive Architecture and Cloud-Native Architecture? “. This is intended for mixed audience; technical resources can use the below to communicate the value to the business stakeholders.

What is Modern Application Architecture?

First, this is quick intro to the Modern Application Architecture or the Reactive Architecture Principles. MAA is an architecture paradigm that combines the powers of Reactive architecture, Cloud-Native Architecture and Microservices architecture and APIs.

APIs will give you the ability to expose digital assets and business functions as programming interfaces where it could be utilized by other applications or monetized for commercial use.

Microservices architecture style provides the ability to build systems faster using loosely coupled services.

Reactive is a set of architecture concepts and design pattern that grouped under a single manifesto. The Reactive manifesto built on top of event driven architecture and the Actor model to create responsive, elastic and resilient systems. Many organizations are looking to build a reference architecture to meet those requirements to respond to a new digital era requirements driven by mobile, cloud, AI, machine learning, IoT and other recent digital use cases. Link to the Reactive Manifesto here.

Combining Reactive, Microservices and APIs is going to produce the following business values.

Faster time to market

Almost every business is in a digital race, to provide more and more digital business functions, many lines of businesses within the organization are competing to win IT resources and deliver much needed digital features. Many IT departments are struggling with the overwhelming demand. Faster time to market is not an optional requirement anymore, instead it’s an essential one.

Microservices is naively supporting faster time to market, however, Lightbend Reactive open-source based implementation is covering a variety of  core distributed systems features where developers need to address otherwise.  Such as concurrency, messaging, error handling, fault  tolerance and cluster management.

Reducing the cost of running business applications (Infrastructure)

Reactive Microservices built on top of the Actor model and offers efficient use of computing power, storage and networking and by doing so; it can run millions of transactions at the fraction of the cost of the traditional models. The Cloud cost charging model is unforgiving when it comes to opex and the poor resource utilization.

Reducing the cost of building business applications

• Less system programming

The less spending on low-level or system programming, the better, businesses should focus more on building business features instead of reinventing the wheel and spend time, money on building frameworks.

Lightbend created open-source based Reactive Systems foundation toolkits and frameworks that can be utilized to build distributed systems.

• Eliminate redundant code

By using Reactive Microservices and APIs, we encourage reusability and eliminate business functions redundancy. We are building a single set of business services that can serve multiple channels such as web, mobile and kiosks instead of rebuilding that set of business functions for every channel separately.

Increasing customers’ traction and loyalty

• Know your customer better

Event driven architecture supports event streaming, where we can capture customers’ behavior and product usage trends among other factors as streamed events where we can use the information gleaned from this to build more efficient business applications that cut on inventory waste or responds more diligently to customers’ needs.

• Responsive and available business applications

Now a days; customers are less and less forgiving when it comes to non-performing or unavailable apps, responsiveness is one of the main factors that decides the popularity of an app.

Responsiveness or lack of , can lead to winning or  losing customers’ loyalty.

Creating new revenue generation and cost cutting opportunities

Business Growth

The ability to respond to business growth in a timely fashion. Legacy technologies and architecture that suffer from resource contention and lack the ability to build and support distributed systems will limit business growth. Reactive is elastic by nature and support flourishing growth opportunities. While, it has the ability to free computing resources if not needed.

Automation

Automation provides cost cutting opportunities

Reactive provides the solid foundation for automation by supporting AI, machine learning and IoT applications. Reactive supports event processing which is the core foundation for those data streaming based business applications.

Monetizing your digital assets

Many analysts view the current fortune of Amazon is owed to a famous Jeff Bezos internal memo on using APIs to expose digital assets and making APIs the only method of service to service communication within different teams. By doing so, Amazon gained a fortune of commercializing their digital assets.

Many businesses don’t realize the commercial value of their digital assets, missing the opportunity to commercialize those assets through APIs. By using Reactive and APIs businesses can discover new revenue generation opportunities that was never utilized before, for instance exposing and monetizing pricing engine or payment processing engine.

Learn more

If you would like to learn more about Reactive use cases and the associated business value, please check this Lightbend -The main driving force behind the Reactive Manifesto- case studies page here.

Also, Lightbend hosts an annual Reactive Summit, where many customers and partners will join in and present their use cases, highlighting the business value of utilizing Reactive Microservices, here’s the link to the Lightbend events page.

About Logic Keepers

Logic Keepers is a Software Development and Technology Enabled Services Company, bringing back the logic into Cloud-Architecture and Fast Data, educating the IT community about the tremendous value of Cloud-Native Architecture, Reactive Architecture and Reactive Microservices.

We accomplish this by following a balanced pragmatic approach, you can’t just introduce the concept without providing the use cases and the implementation.

If you lean too much on just the concepts, then it’s theoretical or if you go too far on the infrastructure side of things such as K8S heavy, then it’s more of a DevOps exercise and leaving the developers behind.

Check for more information here on how we accomplish this in our Modern Application Architecture Workshops.

This is not just about knowledge, you have to include coaching and mentoring as well in your learning plans.