Developing Modern Applications on AWS: Core Components & AWS Services

The development of modern applications has increased substantially over the last few years due to the demands for speed, scalability, security, and flexibility in the market today. AWS provides resources and services to support all of these factors when developing modern applications to simplify and optimize the application development process.

This article explains modern application development as well as its core components such as automation, CI/CD and integration of APIs and Microservices. We also shed some light on AWS Modern Application development infrastructure and services. 

What Is a Modern Application?

A modern application is an application built on the "cloud native" paradigm with serverless operational models and agile development processes. Applications built in this manner help organizations to innovate at a fast pace with the help of automation and significantly reduce total ownership costs. 

Core Components of Modern Application Development

These are the core components of modern application development that ensure speed, automation, security and scalability. 

Automation

One of the more important aspects of modern application development is automation. To ensure that application deployment is rapid with fewer errors, developers are moving towards full automation for processes from compiling code to deploying new builds to servers. It's more than just traditionally manual tasks that involve repetitive actions that can be automated now, it’s also possible to automate functions like debugging or Continuous Integration (CI).

As part of the DevOps approach, tools like Puppet provide a comprehensive orchestration environment for automating IT infrastructure based on code changes. When combined with AWS, Puppet provides the missing parts of the deployment puzzle by making it easy to deploy these changes onto servers in different regions or on-premises environments using AWS CloudFormation templates. 

Continuous Integration (CI)

Continuous integration allows for faster deployment of modern apps in development environments. Leveraging CI also sets the foundation for code quality improvements by encouraging the deployment of small batches iteratively and rapidly that have been reviewed at multiple stages. Such a process ensures increased security and better reliability too. Moreover, implementing automated testing during the development pipeline will also reduce manual testing, which can be time-consuming, costly, and result in more human errors.

In addition, CI can help simplify infrastructure, reduce operational overheads, and lower costs by allowing developers to build increasingly efficient microservices-based architectures with distributed presence instead of singular services.

Continuous Delivery (CD)

CD is a development and release strategy that organizations can use to accelerate delivery, reduce risk, and lower costs in modern application development. The goal of CD is to support the delivery of new revenue-generating features as soon as they're developed, without any delays, and continuously improve those features over time. The first step to implementing CD is building an automated build and test system that can handle changes in your codebase without manual intervention. 

Your automated build system then handles all the steps needed to compile and test your modern application. For example, you can ensure your build system installs any package dependencies required by your application and performs smoke tests to ensure that all the pieces work together correctly. Your automated test system needs to ensure that your application works after each change.

Microservices and APIs

Microservices and APIs have become a huge part of modern application development as the combined components support a much more agile IT process. 

Microservices enable organizations to better achieve their business objectives by separating the individual components from the application. This way, developers can keep track of changes to one piece without needing to wait for updates across the rest of the app.

Microservices also provide a way for organizations to scale as needed without needing to do major overhauls on infrastructure. Microservices allow businesses to use basic infrastructure services to build scalable solutions that can handle spikes in traffic or other high-demand situations without any issues. 

Finally, by optimizing microservice-based architecture, developers can spend more time focusing on their core business logic instead of infrastructure maintenance while giving them the ability to reuse existing modules of code. Developing microservices architectures requires teams to adopt new methodologies like continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), or DevOps principles.

Security and Compliance

Security and Compliance can be divided into four parts, such as Authentication, Authorization, Auditing & Governance and Validation. 

As part of modern application development, it’s critical to follow secure authentication protocols that are capable of preventing any malicious access. Implementing policies such as the AWS Zero-Trust model also allows you to minimize access control for better security. It is also important to ensure that all your workloads comply with the compliance requirements according to your organization and industry.

Modern Applications Development on AWS

The core focus of modern applications is to automate various development processes. Therefore, modern applications rely on continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) for end-to-end automation. This includes automation building and running calls all the way up to final deployment. 

AWS uses serverless technologies and containers for the development of modern applications that can bring innovation to your organization. Quickly achieve your goals by deploying apps at a rapid pace by leveraging the below services. 

AWS CodeCommit

AWS offers several technologies to help you build and test an automated build and test system. For example, AWS CodeCommit is a fully-managed source control service that makes it easier to manage the rapid pace of development in today's cloud environment by securely storing code for each major version. 

AWS CodePipeline

AWS CodePipeline is another AWS service that provides the missing tool for developers who want to automate the deployment of their application by using Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) best practices. These pipelines not only provide a scalable, reliable, and cost-effective way to deliver your application, but the implementation will also reduce risk, time to market, and total cost of ownership.

AWS CodeStar

The AWS CodeStar service allows for the creation of applications on AWS with ready-made templates. It also provides pre-configured application stacks so that the developer only needs to choose a template, specify configuration information, and deploy their app.

AWS CodeStar can help developers save time by automatically providing all the infrastructure needed to power their applications, including load balancing, auto-scaling, monitoring, security controls, and more. It also helps reduce errors by using best practices for configuring your application stack. You can inquire about other services at AWS Modern Applications WhitePaper.

The CI/CD patterns can be used to deploy modern applications of various types such as single-page applications, deploying applications to containers and canary deployments to AWS Lambda.

Summary

Developing modern applications on AWS is much smoother, whether you want prebuilt templates or total control over configuring your environment from scratch, there is an option that will suit all needs.

Caylent provides a critical DevOps-as-a-Service function to high growth companies looking for expert support with microservices, containers, cloud infrastructure, and CI/CD deployments. Our managed and consulting services are a more cost-effective option than hiring in-house, and we scale as your team and company grow.