Modern Application Development on AWS: Pathways that Generate Business Value

The highly competitive and innovative-focused market of the modern application is leading the way we deliver customer value, regardless of the industry. Companies now come to emphasize the importance of efficient performance and user experience which are direct, though not necessarily immediate consequences of a competently and timely built application in response to the needs of the market. It is indeed a struggle for many organizations to bridge the gap between innovative features and the practical technological challenges of their embodiment. Despite seeming to be a way to reach this golden medium, the cloud is actually far from being the simplest silver bullet solution.

If they are after innovation, optimization and customer experience improvement, businesses had better follow modern application development practices and approaches. The most basic of them include adopting modular architecture patterns, setting up serverless operational models, and implementing agile development processes. Though we are going to look into the ways in which Amazon Web Services (AWS) contribute to creating a reliable, quick-to-market and cost-effective application, we will focus on the primary methods to build the foundation of modern application development for your company’s solution.

Why build modern applications on AWS?

If your organization is ready to take up the challenge of application modernization, and you have established that the cloud is a suitable environment for your solution to be based and rolled out in, let us consider the reasons for choosing the leading cloud-service provider which is AWS.

Developing modern applications on AWS ultimately results in faster and more efficient business value realization in addition to enhanced business outcomes as a consequence inasmuch as AWS enables businesses to:

1. Enhance the app’s reliability and availability alongside user experience and customer satisfaction.
2. Scale easily in accordance with the users’ needs leading to high business adaptability and strong competitive standing.
3. Strengthen security and compliance for minimized data breach risks and safeguarded sensitive information.
4. Boost agility and accelerate time-to-market leading to faster deployments and new feature launches.
5. Optimize cost and raise ROI based on the pay-as-you-go model as opposed to fixed upfront payments.
6. Increase flexibility and choice, allowing the development of hybrid architectures to benefit from both on-premises and cloud-based services.
7. Streamline operations and the technology stack to boost performance with minimized complexities.

Increased reliability and availability of applications

For businesses which prioritize customer satisfaction and user experience, ensuring a reliable application by constructing it on AWS services has a direct connection to appropriate brand reputation and customer loyalty. AWS modern application development allows the construction of infrastructure with multiple availability zones to eliminate the risk of outages. Minimized disruptions affect the revenue and market share of the organization. It is thus sensible to invest in the use of modern application development to ensure the success of the business in a competitive market.

Scalability to meet changing user needs

Scaling applications is facilitated with AWS application development services, and so enabling businesses to meet the growing demands of their user base. This allows companies to remain competitive and maintain customer loyalty by serving seamless experiences in spite of peaks in demand. By leveraging AWS scalability features, businesses can adapt to changing user needs, ultimately leading to increased revenue and improved customer retention. Recognizing the significance of meeting changeable user requirements and how different services, including AWS services, can assist in achieving this is key.

Enhanced security and compliance

Personal data security and compliance with internationally acknowledged standards are a primary concern to app customers and owners alike. In response to the need, AWS services for app development provide advanced security and compliance protocols, which can be tailored to your app’s requirements. With a reliable and secure solution, you are much more likely to gain the trust of your customers and partners which means more business opportunities, enhanced performance, and increased user satisfaction.

Improved agility and speed to market

The faster a business can adapt to market demands, the longer it can stay competitive. An organization’s market share and competitive advantage depend largely on its responsiveness and agility to external conditions which are preconditioned by how easily and swiftly development and deployment occur. By utilizing the tools and services provided by AWS, organizations can arrive at faster time-to-market and a competitive edge over their competitors. Additionally, AWS’s flexible infrastructure allows businesses to quickly adjust to changes in demand, allowing them to scale resources up or down as needed. Process automation also enables streamlining operations and boosting efficiency, reducing costs and improving performance.

Cost savings and improved ROI

Opting for AWS cloud application development services company for solution construction and deployment means significant cost optimization. Correct service choices and settings allow companies to reduce investments in order to allocate resources to further innovation and generally increase ROI.

Amazon offers businesses to benefit from the pay-as-you-go model and dispose of the hefty upfront investments for infrastructure construction and maintenance by paying exclusively for resources and services an environment consumes at a given time. Numerous pricing models suggested by AWS make sure you balance operational expenses and improve the solution’s profitability.

Greater flexibility and choice

AWS cloud application development services provide businesses with the flexibility to build hybrid architectures that utilize both cloud-native and on-premises resources. In this way, businesses optimize their infrastructure to meet specific user needs, adapt to evolving requirements, and respond quickly to market changes. Leveraging AWS infrastructure allows organizations to enhance their competitive edge, and increase market share.

Infrastructure maintenance may be a resource-consuming task, so what AWS offers is a range of tools and services that enable automated infrastructure management infrastructure. More efficient management influences operational costs and productivity, allowing for better resource allocation.

Streamlined operations and simplified technology stack

Organizations can attain streamlined operations and simplified technology stacks by opting for application development on AWS. Amazon’s advanced tools and services manage many of the underlying infrastructure and operational tasks thus relieving resources for businesses to focus on the prioritized areas for generating revenue in the future. The infrastructure that AWS offers is highly flexible and scalable to enable prompt modification to fluctuating demand without compromising performance or effectiveness.

Another benefit one can attain from constructing an environment on AWS is a great level of automation. Implementing automation for formerly manual processes decreases the time and expenses associated with operational tasks, resulting in quicker and more efficient application development and deployment. This is the way of assuring that businesses better allocate their resources, increasing productivity and focusing on revenue and growth-driving activities.

Application modernization pathways on AWS

AWS cloud application development is a robust method of designing, constructing, and maintaining software in the cloud. This approach improves the dexterity of development teams, as well as the reliability and security of applications, allowing you to build and launch innovative products quickly. Based on our over a decade of experience creating applications, we have identified three paths that clients can follow to transform their ideas of modernizing their solutions and creating value for their businesses.

1. Creating new applications on AWS with Kubernetes.

Businesses that are either currently operating Kubernetes on-premises or contemplating developing new applications on Kubernetes can utilize AWS to execute these workloads to enhance their reliability, security, and scalability. Adopting this method presents control over the server level, common operational tooling, and access to the extensive portfolio of AWS application development services in an integrated manner.

2. Developing applications on managed containers and serverless architecture.

With a view to enhancing agility and facilitating development while incorporating automation and minimizing server management, we suggest building new solutions or their features with managed containers, serverless technologies, and purpose-built databases.

3. Adopting a modern DevOps model.

With a focus on rapidly developed and deployed stringently secure and governed modern solutions with a high volume and a large number of users, businesses choose to employ AWS application development services and other DevOps tools.
We will delve into each of the mentioned pathways to demonstrate how they can improve agility, reduce expenses, and create modern solutions that drive business value delivery. It is possible to modernize applications from any point in their lifecycle with the outcome in the shape of secure, dependable, flexible, and readily accessible solutions.

Build new applications on AWS with Kubernetes

Whether motivated by the competition on the market, or enhanced value delivery, an increasing number of customers prefer revamping their organizations by developing new applications to leverage the cloud’s full potential. App modernization can be just as diverse as the multitude of applications and the states they are in. However, if something can be certain when it comes to modernization, it is the more frequent choice of containers: they offer a lightweight and flexible approach to deploying new applications. Containers are particularly useful for complex application architectures that count on fast deployment, flexibility, and continuous innovation possibilities regardless of the environment of the app.

So as to the switch to containerized apps, the resource allocation decision is among the first ones in question. The choice of the best-suiting container orchestration platform is of the greatest importance. While the market offers different opportunities for managing complicated deployments and automating the infrastructure, Kubernetes is a well-justified choice for those after open-source software. Being widely recognized as an extensive containerized app’s infrastructure, it is a highly flexible and scalable system with consistent open-source APIs for the seamless interoperation of multiple services and resources within an application.

Kubernetes allows running and managing containerized apps across different environments, including on-premises, in the cloud or in hybrid clouds. In order to increase the security and consistency of the Kubernetes-based workloads, many businesses take on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). For various organizations, at any point of their modernization journey or experience with Kubernetes – Amazon EKS can be a favorable choice as it strengthens the app’s reliability and security with access to AWS services, operational tools and best-proven strategies.

To fully enjoy the benefits of Amazon EKS in both on-premises and hybrid environments, Amazon developed EKS Anywhere. As a deployment option, it enables keeping latency-sensitive or regulated applications in a private cloud on-premises, though it also provides a consistent toolset across multiple environments. EKS Anywhere helps take full advantage of EKS to create and deploy scalable and secure containerized apps in different environments.

Kubernetes is an extensive orchestration technology for deploying and running containers. For this reason, constructing a custom EKS cluster becomes a cumbersome and laborious process taking into account all the available open-source tools and AWS services which require advanced knowledge of both AWS and Kubernetes to be integrated and applied appropriately. In order to settle this need, Amazon created EKS Blueprints, a set of pre-built templates with pre-configured settings to simplify the integration of Kubernetes and Amazon EKS tools with a view to prompt app deployment without specialized expertise.

Why use Kubernetes for modern application development

As an open-source technology, Kubernetes enables running and managing containerized apps on any platform without modifying your operational tools. With a dedicated community supporting it, Kubernetes is consistently enhanced and updated. Moreover, numerous open-source projects and vendors offer Kubernetes-compatible software, enabling you to enhance and expand your infrastructure.

An example of such software which allows deploying Kubernetes clusters to bring about high security, scalability and availability to the infrastructure is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (E2C). With this method, organizations, which possess the necessary expertise in Kubernetes deployments, retain their control over not only compute instances, but also deployment, maintenance, and scaling procedures. Another undeniable merit to the use of E2C is the worldwide accessibility along with the dependability and resilience that AWS Regions and Availability Zones have to offer.

On the other hand, AWS Fargate provides a serverless environment for businesses that wish to bypass the burden of having to manage a compute infrastructure. Instead, this service allows:

• Avoiding the operational overhead of scaling, fixing, securing, and administering servers.
• Boosting security with workload segregation by default, with dedicated runtime environments for Amazon EKS pods.
• Benefiting from the pay-as-you-go pricing and purchasing only the resources you actually use while running containerized apps.

Build on managed containers and serverless services

As stated above, the adoption of container technology is a common initial step for many organizations to modernize their applications. This shift enables them to avoid spending resources on operational tasks and dedicate time and effort to developing new features and applications instead. More and more companies are opting for AWS-managed container services like Amazon EKS or Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate, with a view to introducing ever more scalable, reliable, secure, and accessible solutions. What leveraging managed container services provides is the reduction in operational burden and freed-up resources to concentrate on team upskilling, and accelerated development of modern and more innovative applications using serverless computing.

How AWS defines serverless

According to AWS, serverless means developing and running applications and services without the need for operating servers. In a serverless architecture, infrastructure is automatically managed by the cloud provider which allows developers to devote their time and effort to writing code and delivering business value, without splitting their focus to server management issues such as capacity provisioning, software patching, or infrastructure scaling. The four fundamental principles of a serverless approach involve:

• No server management
  Server provisioning, maintaining and managing are not included in the software design.
• Flexible scaling
  Individual servers do not govern capacity allocation; scaling occurs automatically, e.g. on the basis of change in throughput, memory or other units of consumption.
• Pay-for-value
  What you pay for includes such value-delivery enhancing features as consistent throughput or execution duration, rather than server units.
• Automated high availability
  Developers can focus on innovation since the availability and fault tolerance have already been architected in the serverless apps.

Innovation with serverless

App modernization relies on using tools, methods, and approaches for developing agile solutions. The modern serverless infrastructure allows developers to enjoy responsiveness and accelerated innovation in crafting apps that comply with international security standards and automatically scale to millions of concurrent users globally.

Numerous app owners prefer the serverless-first approach to solution development which prioritizes the implementation of serverless services with the aim of increasing agility within the app stack. This strategy proved to render the benefits of dynamic scaling, cloud-native high accessibility, and automatic server administration combined with a pay-as-you-go pricing model. The main merit of serverless-first, as specified by developer teams, is time and effort released from the shifted focus to faster innovation and consequently time-to-market.
AWS infrastructure enables the development of front-end web and mobile tools and services, which can be built with ease. Applications built on AWS are highly secure, accessible, and scalable, providing a solid foundation for brands to deliver their services to a global audience.

Monoliths to microservices: architectural shift for modern applications

Admittedly, legacy monolithic architecture is easy in administering in certain circumstances, such as limited infrastructure scale. As the application expands, though, numerous challenges emerge, involving ownership redistribution of the solution within the teams and, more acutely, scaling. Monolithically predisposed to hard dependencies, app architecture resists scaling even in cases of strong accountability and assigned responsibility among the team members.

To be more specific, when working on a monolithic architecture, multiple developers have to navigate a shared release pipeline, which leads to challenges at various stages of the process. During development, engineers have to orchestrate change implementations to avoid breaking existing code, while any updates to a shared library require getting everyone on board at the same time. Additionally, attempting to quickly implement important fixes still necessitates merging changes in progress. Post-development, monoliths cause further obstacles when pushing changes through the delivery pipeline. Even minor amendments to code require coordination among engineers, merging code, addressing release conflicts, rebuilding the entire application, running test suites, and redeploying.

Microservices are an obvious reliable way out for an app’s agility and responsiveness. Complex, and cumbersome in maintenance and upgrading, monoliths are broken down into separate, more manageable components, the microservices. The latter then can be scaled, deployed, owned and administered independently by separate teams, resulting in the aforementioned increased agility and scalability.

An application built with a microservice architecture consists of self-sufficient units, whereby each component is responsible for running a single process as a service. Microservices are created to perform specific functions and can be managed by a single development team. Hence, each microservice can be scaled, updated, and deployed independently to meet the demand for specific functions. Communication between independent units takes place through lightweight APIs, events, or streams, all of which are well-defined interfaces. Event-driven architecture, which swiftly responds to changes in data, is a cost-efficient means to boost application scalability, agility and resiliency.

Serverless-first for modern application development

What will take the burden of operational management off the list of your major tasks and allow you to focus on the core value-generating business activities is once again the serverless-first approach. Such processes as app monitoring, provisioning, cost allocation and management, deployment, security and compliance, etc. have already been taken care of if you choose microservices architecture. Prioritizing serverless technologies means making the most of AWS’s operational advantages in favor of constant innovation.

A serverless operational strategy enables developers to create and operate applications and services without having to worry about server management, supplemented by a cost-effective pay-as-you-go pricing model. The automation of the serverless-first approach also offers engineers numerous opportunities to allocate resources to the more prominent customer-facing aspects of the application instead of administering infrastructure. Lastly, this strategy will benefit the innovation and modernization processes with cloud-native agility and scalability.

Leveraging AWS Lambda and managed container services on AWS

Cloud computing evolution dictates the current mostly preferred computing options; for now, instances are not the only one available. In order to determine the best computing option for your solution, consider if self-managing infrastructure could improve your business, if you have the necessary expertise to apply the computing option in question, and if the additional effort invested in the chosen option is likely to bring value.

Many customers now choose to use container services such as Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS, or serverless compute services like AWS Lambda to avoid server management. Realistically speaking, the most common and optimal way is using a combination of services, e.g. the report has it that AWS customers find value in using both AWS containers and AWS Lambda, with around 80% of container customers also using Lambda. Not only this particular combination, but many other mixed uses of the like provide benefits such as managed services with strong integration to AWS infrastructure, support for various use cases, simplified complexity, and access to a large network of partners.

Transform to a modern DevOps model

Swift innovation earns many organizations a competitive edge. It has been proven time and again that investments in agility and speed-aimed practices and approaches promote experimentation and accelerate the release of new ideas associated with enhanced value delivery. For this simple reason, having administering and management issues sorted out, Amazon leverages modern applications to innovate within agile and scalable environments.

As per Amazon, modern application development lies in empowering individuals to achieve superior customer outcomes. The cornerstone idea behind it posits “products, not projects”. Essentially, this holistic approach entails that the teams’ responsibility includes not only product creation and deployment but also management and maintenance.

To be added, AWS’s decade-long experience in developing and running scalable, reliable and agile solutions also suggests the importance of autonomy within teams. The ownership issue has found its solution in assigning accountability for each component within an app’s lifecycle, inclusive of receiving customer input, charting the course, and building and running the solution, to the team so as to keep it motivated to produce value and results for end-users. In this way, Amazon has safe-proofed teams’ motivation and creativity with autonomy and risk-taking.

Encouraging ownership culture in modern application development is not an easy task, as it requires significant changes in mindset, team structure, and responsibility allocation.

Benefits of modern application development on AWS with Romexsoft

Developing and modernizing applications can be challenging and expensive for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with constraints on available resources. Therefore, partnering with an AWS-certified software development vendor, such as Romexsoft, benefits SMBs substantially. It is best shown through the extensive capabilities AWS offers for developing, deploying and managing highly-effective applications.

As specified by an IDC’s recent survey, small and medium-sized businesses partnering with AWS managed to optimize their IT infrastructure costs by 20% in comparison with conventional on-premises solutions. Besides, Deloitte’s report suggests that SMBs using cloud technology in their business operations witness a 25% increase in revenue and a 26% increase in profits as opposed to those legacy companies disregarding the cloud. These figures best reveal the significance of cloud-native services for SMBs’ competitive standing.

Prospective advantages a business can experience in partnership with an AWS-certified software development vendor encompass:

Expertise and guidance
AWS-certified cloud services vendors can boast of a comprehensive knowledge of AWS serverless application development, including numerous industry-leading tools and methods. This allows vendors, such as ourselves, to offer expertise by guiding businesses in adopting the most suitable services and practices to design and deploy or modernize their applications on AWS.

Faster development and deployment
Although AWS provides a long list of tools and services for designing app infrastructure, it is increasingly challenging to select the right tool, service, or approach, let alone combine them in the most effective way, without the experience and expertise of an AWS-certified vendor.

Cloud infrastructure cost optimization
AWS-certified software development vendors’ experience is directly proportional to the skill of detecting cost optimization opportunities and adopting cost-efficient solutions tailored to a company’s specific requirements. Partner with a trusted vendor to enhance your infrastructure and minimize expenses without compromising on quality or performance.

Thought-out scalability and performance for your app
Competent in the proven AWS best practices, approaches and services, certified vendors are ready to contribute to the development, deployment and maintenance of reliable regardless of failures, scalable in the face of fluctuating demand and highly effective applications.On top of that, we would like to additionally enumerate several compelling arguments in favor of Romexsoft among regular software development vendors.

Functional expertise
The first point among our advantages in the market of software development vendors is practical competence. The specialized skills we have developed under Amazon’s supervision are backed up by AWS certification. Internationally acknowledged, this kind of expertise earns the credibility of many companies globally, in creating and modernizing their infrastructures in factors including security, optimized spending, and, most notably, performance.

Knowledge of AWS best practices
Our credentials as an AWS-certified vendor assure customers of our knowledge and skillset on the peculiarities of Amazon’s diverse tools and best practices portfolio, required to successfully render AWS consulting and application development services. Both practical and advisory help prevents common pitfalls that customers experience on their way to cloud-effective modern applications.

Compliance with AWS standards
Maintaining our AWS certification compels Romexsoft to only deliver the utmost quality services that comply with the highest standards in the industry set by Amazon.