Covid: Software Architects Perspective

Covid has had a huge impact on almost every businesses/sector and domain. The change has been felt in the software architectural world as well. Business pressures has been immense on software architects to realign with the new normal.

The definition of the new normal is at two opposite end of the spectrum. And the impact of these new extreme normals have different implications in enterprise Software Architecture. These extremes fall into these broad categories

• Scale Down

• Scale Up

Pressure from business has been extreme to meet these broad needs.

1. Scale Back

Pressure to reducing fixed costs for a business is unprecedented. Organisations have made choice based on the architectural foundations or new software foundations are being laid at never seen before pace.

1.1 Applications

Horizontal scaling and vertical scaling, generally meant scaling across and up. But covid has brought scaling down/back into fashion.

Both scaling down or shutting down of live applications is one of the first few options explored. Implementation strategy has been slight different for enterprises based on their deployment models.

Cloud Model - Pay as you ago cloud model has enabled organisations to completely shut down or scale down foot print significantly to tune fixed costs.

On-premise Model - On premise model is not a pay as you go model.

• Organisations spent effort to re-provision underlying infra structure to meet scale down or shut down demands.

• Re-provision of hardware to other applications has put pressure on hardware team.

• Data centre run costs at times could not be reduced due unfriendly shut down/scale existing contracts.

Hybrid Model - Organisations that are in hybrid model have few choices. Cost savings are dependent on digital foot print placement on deployment model and infrastructure size.

• Cloud system fall back to cloud model for cost savings

• And the On-premise systems are using On-premise model for cost savings.

1.2 Rationalise Products

Enterprises have saved cost by rationalising technology foot print.

• Where more than one technology was addressing similar business problems or technology problems, rationalisation has reduced the number of softwares solving similar problems.

• Enterprises have also got rid of many software there were nice to have and have stuck around.

• Many shadow IT processes and tools have disappear too in the process.

1.3 De-commission Projects

Covid has accelerated de-commissioning of projects.

• Many projects stuck in business priorities pipeline have come back to life, Covid has brought de-commissioning back from the back burner to the top of the priority list.

• Some applications that were shutdown temporarily might never come back again.

1.4 Network

As demand for many organisation face significant business scaled back, network demand has also scaled back from business volume perspective.

1.5 Cyber Security

Many opportunists in cyber space have tried to exploit these large scale organisational shifts and cyber attacks have increased. Demand on cyber security has increased while organisations going going through such techtonic shifts.

2. Scale Up

2.1 Applications

Business lucky to receive unprecedented surge in demand has placed multi fold increase in demand on business services. This has put uncontrollable and unplanned demand on applications not ready for it. Dynamic scaling up of applications to meet such pressures is hugely dependent on application deployment model.

Cloud Model

• Organisations that hosted application on cloud took the advantage to both scale up and scale out using cloud with relative ease.

On-premise Model

• Organisations not on cloud, have shifted rapidly to cloud based systems. Or

• Enterprises still stuck with on-premise systems unable to scale, have a major problem in hand. Rapid interim solutions have been provisioned sustain business demand.

• Customers have been little more desperate and patient to come back to get services. This has reduced possible lost opportunities cost due to unavailable services.

Hybrid Model

• Hybrid model enabled selective migration, as there are existing in-house templates to plan moving to cloud if need be for dynamic scaling.

2.2 Rapid Prototype

Rapid provisioning and MVP rollout to cash in on some of the new business opportunities has put immense pressure on people, process and technology at the same time.

Enterprises have rapidly taken onboard devops processes, agile methodologies and cloud based technologies to reduce time to market.

2.2 Adding New Products

Enterprises have purchased many new products to make it cheaper, faster and easier for business to operate. Many products have disappeared rapidly and new ones have taken their place.

2.3 Networking

There has been huge demand on the network teams to provision more network bandwidth. Thanks to maximum remote working Or more business demand multiplied over night. There are many such higher demand network scenarios for example more demand for on-premise to cloud network link etc.

Cloud Model

• Cloud based models have enabled enterprises to address network demands with ease for direct client to cloud interfacing points.

• It has also placed more demand on cloud to on-premise network path.

On-Premise

• Higher business volumes on applications on-premise have put unprecedented demand on the on-premise infrastructure. And many a times crippled the network.

• Rapid bandwidth buying has taken place in certain scenarios.

2.4 Remote Working

Cloud Model

• Some organisations have migrated to cloud based desktops solutions. And are planning to continue to be on cloud based desktop in future as well. As organisations are looking at a different operating model in terms of office space usage.

On-premise

• Remote working using on-premise hosted services do add additional network pressures.

• But workload has increased on VPN paths.

2.5 Agile Teams

Organisations just exploring agile working models have been pushed into it. Software teams have been rapidly changed to agile operating model due to business demands.

2.6 Cyber Security

While scaling up to enterprises are facing upsurge from cyber attacks. Many new organisations that have gained huge customer bases but not tightened their cyber security have faced, significant attacks.

Opportunists see new attack vectors, and more data is a gold mine worth the effort to be protected and attacked at the same time.