According to Gartner, the future is composable and at the edge, two must-have technologies for companies seeking innovation and digital resilience.1,2 Building composable applications on an edge computing platform streamlines developers’ work and accelerates business opportunities—and the best part: with the advantages of a composable by design platform that allows you to unlock the full potential of modern applications.
Given the current software development landscape, which demands scalability, flexibility, and speed, what are the challenges of building applications, the key benefits of creating them at the edge and how can we put this into practice? That’s what we’ll explore next.
Challenges of Building Applications
In the era of digitalization, everything relies on software—and consequently, applications. They must be created and launched quickly to codify business decisions and respond rapidly to market changes.
Building applications is an arduous task, presenting numerous challenges that technology teams have to deal with, including:
- Instead of writing code, developers often spend time optimizing infrastructure or waiting for it to be ready.
- Long integration time for engineers, as many vendors use proprietary technologies.
- Complex product offerings from providers, leading to increased time and effort needed to architect solutions.
- Poor developer experience due to lack of standardization, complexity of existing platforms, and vendor lock-in.
Furthermore, there’s another aspect that is often overlooked: that of those who lead these teams. They face numerous challenges that go beyond the team’s needs and productivity concerns; they must deal with the tech talent shortage in the market, reduce costs, and align operations with business needs.
This is precisely why composable applications, modular and extensible applications, emerge as the best solution for software development. As part of the modern composable approach3, they bring more efficiency to operations and more agility in response to market demands.
You might wonder, “Okay, I already understand that modular applications speed up software development and business strategies, but if they are built with independent, flexible, and reusable modules, like Lego bricks, what would be the best infrastructure to unlock the full potential of these building blocks and in a simpler way?”—an edge computing platform.
What Are the Benefits of Building Composable Applications at the Edge?
The advantage of building modular applications at the edge is that you can simultaneously gain value for production and decision-making at different points of the journey. This results from the combination of the following:
1. Increased productivity
- 100% NoOps and serverless platform so that developers can focus on coding.
- NoCode and LowCode options to build faster.
- Support for standardized libraries and frameworks: no time wasted learning new proprietary technologies.
- Reusable edge functions: write code once and run it anywhere or reuse existing code by simply recompiling it for the edge.
- Templates and ready-made third-party solutions for a multitude of use cases.
- Plug-and-play modules for everyday use cases such as caching, image processing, load balancing, and application acceleration.
- Automatic procurement and simplified integration of marketplace solutions.
2. Cost reduction and new possibilities to innovate
- Do more with less: fast development and time-to-value with templates and a marketplace.
- Lower operational costs due to simplified (composable) architecture, NoOps, and serverless infrastructure.
- Reduced dependence on hiring or training FTEs.
- Possibility to choose more cost-effective vendors or open-source solutions to reduce costs.
- The potential to adopt citizen computing to further accelerate business agility.
- Increased ability to innovate in response to evolving strategies or market conditions.
Which edge computing platform is the best?
To choose an edge computing platform, you must assess whether it has composability at its core and, unlike on-premises and cloud platforms, whether it abstracts the infrastructure, simplifying the architecture and operations and reducing costs with the flexibility to buy the applications needed to compose your solution.
In Azion’s Edge Computing Platform, this is precisely what you find. Not only will you find ready-made templates to streamline the composition without additional expenses on another product for your entire application, but you will also add more value without increasing spending on the product or solution, thereby increasing competitiveness.
Moreover, edge computing has already emerged as a game-changer for the MACH architecture (an acronym for Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS, and Headless) as it combines all the necessary characteristics to enable this architecture to reach its full potential.
The MACH theme is extensive and has become a top trend. If you want to know more, check out our article here.
Use Case of Composable Applications at Azion’s Edge
Imagine building a house and later wanting a specific automation to make it more modern to save you time and effort, such as turning the garden hose on and off with voice commands. Would you consider building a new house or changing its foundation just to address this? Obviously not.
In essence, this is what a composable application at the edge solves. With it, you can add the specific functions you want, where you want, without compromising what was already in place or overspending on what you don’t need. Like a Lego brick, you simply add a small piece to what was already assembled, a building block with the functionality you want to include.
Let’s see this in practice: here’s an example with a composable security application, vital for applications of any industry.
Suppose you are using DDoS Protection in your e-commerce but want to create a more robust and intelligent security journey for your solution because your shopping cart is critical. In that case, you can add a Bot Manager edge function from the Azion Marketplace to a part of your already-available application without compromising or changing anything else.
Since composable applications can be used at various points in the journey, a developer can log into Azion’s platform and run a template from scratch or add another solution with an edge function. Alternatively, an Azion customer with applications already running on the platform can easily incorporate more solutions.
Azion Marketplace: Explore the Full Potential of Combining Edge Computing and Composable Applications
The Azion Marketplace is our digital catalog designed to simplify the way you find, test and implement ready-made solutions on Azion’s Edge Computing Platform.
In this channel, you can create or reuse composable applications from existing free libraries or from third-party solutions, integrating them into new or existing applications on our platform. Check out some examples here in our documentation.
Simplify today the way you build tomorrow and discover all the composable applications Azion offers.
Create a free account to see for yourself and receive US$ 300.00 in service credits or talk to one of our experts to learn more.
References
1,3 Future of Applications: Delivering the Composable Enterprise (Gartner)
