Shortening time to market is a huge priority for many businesses. Reducing the time it takes to get a product to market gives you a competitive advantage that allows you to stay ahead of your competitors, react faster to market changes, and increase your company’s market share.
Releasing products and services faster can also results in lower R&D costs, less waste, and greater customer loyalty and satisfaction, as you release newer and more innovative products faster than others in the market.
One method for speeding your time to market comes from incorporating agile development methodologies and DevOps practices into your application development process. With modern application development, you can create more reliable, secure, and scalable applications. Your team can also respond quickly to changes in requirements or the development environment.
What Are Modern Apps?
Modern applications use DevOps practices to leverage the features of cloud-native architectures by developing and packaging code and dependencies in containers and deploying them as microservices to support faster development.
The modern application development process comprises several techniques, methodologies, and technologies that allow developers to build and release applications faster than traditional software development processes. Features of modern application development include the use of agile development processes, modular microservices, continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery/deployment (CD), and serverless operational models.
The modern application development process can speeds up the build and release cycle, allowing developers to create new features and release updates faster. Automated build, test, and delivery processes help reduce the rate of error throughout the entire development life cycle, resulting in faster product delivery.
How Modern Apps Accelerate Time to Market
With modern application development, developers can bring new features and updates to market more quickly. Several other aspects also contribute to a lower overall time to market. These include improved collaboration, modular microservices, virtualization, and CI/CD.
Continuous Collaboration
In traditional software development methodologies, software requirements are gathered at the beginning of the development life cycle. Modern application development, on the other hand, uses an incremental approach that requires continuous communication between team members. Users, developers, testers, and operations teams all work together to develop the application.
Modern application development is based on agile development techniques and technologies that encourage ongoing collaboration between all members of the software development team, including developers, IT operations, and users. The use of DevOps helps to eliminates the divide between software development and operations teams to ensure both teams are working toward common goals and can communicate effectively to solve problems.
Having all stakeholders engaged in the development process vastly reduces the chances that requirements will be misunderstood or incorrectly implemented. Continuous collaboration helps team members find and fix issues early on and keeps the project on track. As a result, the project is more likely to be released to production within the expected time frame.
Microservices
In traditional monolithic application development, all parts of the application are tightly integrated, making them difficult to scale and update. Conversely, modern applications use a modular design structure that enables developers to test and debug individual components of the application without having to run the entire program.
Modern applications are developed in small chunks using microservices and APIs. Microservices are modular components that can be created, tested, and deployed independently of each other. Microservices are created around reusable pieces of functionality, which makes it easier for developers to reuse code to create new features. This considerably reduces the time it takes to build an application.
With microservices, new components—as well as updates and upgrades to existing components—can be made independently and released without having to wait for all of the components to be completed. This supports faster innovation and reduces the time it takes to release new products to market.
Virtualization
Modern applications are created using virtualized development and test environments, eliminating the need to set up hardware or software for application development and testing.
With virtualization solutions like platform as a service (PaaS), developers don’t need to set up development environments. Instead, PaaS provides a fully featured cloud computing platform, including the software and hardware tools needed for application development.
Modern applications use virtualization to abstract applications away from their underlying infrastructure. This increases portability and enables the app to run in on-premises, cloud, or hybrid-cloud environments.
With virtualization, application developers can create dedicated development and test environments and scale IT infrastructure on demand. This vastly reduces the time needed to set up application environments for development, testing, and production. It also indirectly reduces time to market.
CI/CD
In traditional software development environments, merging code from multiple development branches can be complex and time-consuming. Developers may need to spend time fixing merge conflicts.
Developers use tools, frameworks, and processes that help them deliver new features to customers faster and more securely, indirectly decreasing time to market. Modern applications make use of DevOps practices like CI/CD to eliminate the manual repetitive tasks that can increase development time.
In the first part of the CI/CD process, continuous integration merges incremental code changes to a master repository on a regular basis. The merge triggers an automated build process that runs unit and integration tests. The CI process seeks to ensures that bugs and integration issues are detected early in the development stages and aren’t propagated through to production.
In the second part of the process, continuous delivery automatically deploys code to other stages of development. Failed code from the CI process isn’t propagated to the next stage. Changes that successfully pass through all stages of the development process are released to the production environment.
CI/CD helps developers find and fix code issues faster, contributing to faster application delivery times and decreased time to market.
Develop Modern Apps Faster with Pure Storage and DevOps
The need for greater speed and flexibility has caused a massive shift in IT delivery.
Modern application development with DevOps allows you to shorten time to market and maintain a competitive edge. A Modern Data Experience™ simplifies your DevOps pipeline to help you break through development bottlenecks, increase productivity, and accelerate the pace of innovation.
- Code faster with instant, self-service development environments on PaaS and infrastructure as a service (IaaS).
- Create concurrent builds with Pure Storage® FlashBlade//S™ to leverage the speed of all-flash storage.
- Use infrastructure as code (IaC) to build automated and repeatable processes for continuous delivery.
Learn more about Pure’s DevOps solutions and bring your next product to market faster than ever before.
