{"id":3249,"date":"2023-05-08T15:12:21","date_gmt":"2023-05-08T15:12:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/business-process-management\/?p=3249"},"modified":"2023-10-02T20:08:51","modified_gmt":"2023-10-02T20:08:51","slug":"three-intersecting-trends-that-power-self-contained-applications","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/business-process-management\/three-intersecting-trends-that-power-self-contained-applications\/","title":{"rendered":"Three Intersecting Trends That Power Self-Contained Applications"},"content":{"rendered":"

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As part of Solutions Review\u2019s\u00a0Contributed Content Series<\/a>\u2014a collection of articles written by industry thought leaders in maturing software categories\u2014<\/span><\/span>Charles Souillard, the CEO and co-founder of Bonitasoft<\/a>, explains how composability, containerization, and the move to modern on-prem deployments are powering self-contained applications.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

For some time now, <\/span>we have been discussing<\/span><\/a> a new approach to business process applications in the domain of BPM-based business process application platforms. At first, we were thinking about “<\/span>autonomous applications.” As<\/span> this concept has matured and the technology to support it is now beginning to become real, we’re speaking about “Self-Contained Applications.”<\/span><\/p>\n

There are several trends in enterprise technology intersecting at the moment: <\/span>composability<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>containerization<\/span><\/i>, and the growing interest in revisiting <\/span>modern-on-prem<\/span><\/i>. These have fed into a new approach to designing and deploying business applications as independent or self-contained.<\/span> In this article, I’ll give a bit of background on why autonomous apps and Self-Contained Apps caught our attention, how the technology has developed, and where it’s going.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Trend of Enterprise Composability<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n

Gartner’s research<\/span><\/a> discusses the move towards enterprise composability like this: “As business needs change, organizations must be able to deliver innovation quickly and adapt applications dynamically\u2014reassembling capabilities from inside and outside the enterprise. To do this, organizations must understand and implement the ‘composable enterprise.'”<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Information systems and software development teams are already familiar with modular and component-based systems. The composition starts at the infrastructure level, often composed of independent, changeable components: CPUs, memory, disk space, and bandwidth, followed by <\/span>composability at the application level. BPM platforms already support the “composable enterprise” by leveraging composable technologies<\/a> and architectures. For example, BPM-based applications are generally made up of composable elements: processes, sub-processes, connectors, services, reusable pieces of code, business rules, and UI fragments, to name a few. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And next, we’ll see more composability at the enterprise information systems level as Self-Contained Applications offer even more flexibility to meet enterprise needs.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Move to Containerization<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n

Containerization is rapidly becoming a widely accepted standard for DevOps teams, and managing deployments is now a different story using container technologies. Generally, business application deployment and management are becoming more accessible and cheaper. Dev teams now have what they need to operate more smoothly by leveraging container-related technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

With containerization, DevOps teams can deploy individual process-based apps independently of the shared platform resources, which is the essential aspect of Self-Contained Applications. With independent applications, it’s possible to deliver faster and scale each application as needed. The DevOps team can maintain one app at a time without disturbing other high-availability apps. Better organizational agility means faster delivery, as the business requires.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The business side will be happy to see the effects of Self-Contained Apps when high-value innovations, updates, and improvements are delivered more quickly thanks to better agility brought by composability.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Both BPM and containerization technologies are widely used and familiar to DevOps teams. However, combining the two in Self-Contained Applications is a revolutionary development with an evolutionary implementation.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Growing Interest in Modern On-Prem (Private Cloud) as an Alternative to PaaS<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n

The massive move to the cloud we have seen over the past few years (IaaS, SaaS, etc.) will continue, but we are beginning to see PaaS platform customers re-evaluate their choices. “As a service” has been the most demanded deployment for BPM-based process applications<\/a> for several years, as privacy and security challenges have been met. But two issues will begin to impact PaaS offers:<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n