The world around us is changing as technology continues to seep into the cracks of our socio-economic structures, rendering it difficult to remember what adhesive we used to hold it all together before…
Learning machines
Our environments are becoming digitally tactile landscapes that monitor and adapt to their inhabitants, and our reality is being augmented by digital information that is becoming an ever-more universal and interactive part of our existence. Learning machines think for us, improve our decision-making processes and automate the mundane aspects of our lives, and technology helps us find love, jobs, knowledge, and even our identities.
The cloud has transformed the way we do business and placed world-class solutions that would previously have been unaffordable for small enterprises within their grasp by eliminating the need for expensive infrastructure. It also evened the playing field to some extent by enabling organisations to compete on the same platform and breakthrough international barriers without stepping out the door.
The Cloud
The cloud-born digital world is all-encompassing and has become enthralling, exciting, and terrifying. At the heart of the digital transformation of our species lies the Data Utility; the Elastic Cloud; the Digital Mesh – a platform that has evolved the dinosaurs of monolithic distributed infrastructure into viral micro-services that consist of microorganisms of code that adapt to their surroundings and evolve in rapid cooperation to enhance the requirements of their host environment.
Similarly, businesses are evolving and modernising to provide their customers with the expectation of high quality, highly agile solutions – an expectation created in the battle-pits of the consumer-driven App Marketplace where a misstep is rewarded with uninstallation, obscurity, and death.
With technology continuously evolving and transforming our lives, every business will become a software business.
If you have your doubts you need only ask the giants of the hospitality industry what Airbnb has done to its industry vertical, or the stalwarts of the transport industry what Uber has meant to their bottom lines. When Public Cloud weaponises your average hobbyist developer with scripted enterprise-grade infrastructure and global reach – and the cost is no longer the barrier-to-entry that holds small players off the playing field… what is the differentiator which separates the global leaders from their contenders?
Engineering Quality. Architecture. Process.
The development of continuously deployed micro-services applications that are responsive to demand, without introducing regressive quality is difficult. Proactively consuming and responding to trillions of events in a global automated communications environment, while making each client feel like they have a relationship with you, is challenging. Dealing with a globally distributed state, delivering millisecond response times, and unlocking value in petabytes of data is an art form.
In modern business, developing global cloud ecosystems is more about the skill and competence of the engineers involved in building the system, than it is about the amount of money that is thrown at the problem…and many of the rules of monolithic IT no longer apply.
One can only imagine that there must have been a point in time where the science of civil-engineering practices was standardised by those who understood the principles of creating structures that could bear the load of the weight placed on them, weather the ravages of time, and use the forces of physics rather than compete with them.
Software engineering science is undergoing a similar standardisation process – in a world where software is becoming the lifeblood of business, it is no longer adequate for the modern organisation to simply find shelter from the elements.
See how HEINEKEN used the Microsoft Azure Cloud to manage promotions that were technically demanding, including one with the UEFA Champions League.
