Application fleet robustness and resilience: strategic imperatives to protect and grow business

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How Mendix's low-code platform helps us prevent technology risk?

?How the IT team can ensure the provision of robust and resilient systems and applications that can ensure business continuity.

Maintaining an application fleet that meets the requirements for robustness and resilience is a crucial strategic priority for business protection and growth. When we talk about robustness and resilience, we refer to two distinct aspects that affect a system's ability to cope with problems and ensure reliable operation over time.

• Robustness refers to the ability of an application to function properly even in the presence of abnormal conditions or unforeseen events internal to the system itself. It is an internal factor because it concerns how the system is designed and implemented: it is related to code quality, exception handling, and the system's ability to minimiza the impact of internal failures. In summary, we can say that a robust application is “strong on the inside”: therefore, it can handle internal errors (such as bugs, invalid memory accesses), withstand failures (e.g., partial failures of some software components), and behave predictably in the presence of abnormal input conditions.
• Resilience, on the other hand, refers to the application's ability to recover from adverse external events and continue to function acceptably by restoring functionality and minimizing down-time. External events can be of various types: hardware failures (power outage, servers suddenly going down), network problems, cyber-attacks, request overload, but also unforeseeable contingencies such as natural disasters or adverse operating conditions. Resilience is an external factor in that it depends on the system's interaction with its environment. In summary, we can say that a resilient application system not only avoids failures but is able to “bounce back” and recover a functionality after a critical event.

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Ignoring these issues creates technological, but more importantly, business risk

An application fleet that does not meet robustness and resilience requirements creates a fragile environment, where even small failures and unforeseen events can have devastating ripple effects on the business. There can be many reasons why this situation arises:?

• the fact that there are dated applications in one's IT environment (and therefore not designed to handle modern requirements in terms of scalability, security, reliability) and that it is difficult to ensure that they are maintained and updated. This is tied closely with the budget and technical resources available: there are often time, cost, and resource constraints that do not allow you to embark on application renewal projects
• the fact that applications are part of complex architectures and integrations: the interdependence of components, if not managed properly, creates a ripple effect that can damage the entire ecosystem. A traditional, let's say monolithic, approach makes it more difficult to isolate problems and scale individual modules. This risk is reduced with modern microservice architectures, which allow applications to be broken down into smaller, independent, easily maintained components.?

Technology risk can become a risk to the entire company to the point of:?

• damaging revenue streams: disruptions or problems can reduce the company's ability to generate revenue
• damage corporate reputation: if the company is not perceived by customers and partners as reliable and able to provide continuous services without glitches there is reputational damage
• halt business operations to the point of compromising production itself

?In an environment where applications must be increasingly reliable and available, IT must be able to provide the business with assurances that applications remain operational under all circumstances and can recover quickly when a failure occurs.

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How we can prevent systems from collapsing like paper castles

Many organizations are looking at low-code as a solution for ensuring resilience and robustness: faster development and iteration times (thus also more testing opportunities), use of predefined and pre-prepared blocks of built-in monitoring and exception handling mechanisms, and the ability to centrally manage and automate updates for the components used, since the underlying code is managed by the low-code platform itself.

This last point, the fact that applications can continue to run without interruption even after an update, is a key issue nowadays. Recall the Crowdstrike case, where a faulty update caused a global outage: this underscores how crucial it is to have an update system that can ensure business continuity even during patching or update processes.

The risk associated with using low-code platforms is related not so much to production-which is greatly simplified because of graphical interfaces and predefined components that can be assembled without the need to write large amounts of code manually-but to process design and integrations.

?At WEGG, we are expert consultants in analyzing business processes in order to optimize them:?

• we identify inefficiencies in existing processes and propose solutions that leverage low-code capabilities for rapid implementation
• we design tailored processes to create customizable solutions that can be adapted to specific business needs. The low-code capability reduces the need to have to adapt processes to existing technologies
• but more importantly, we are able to orchestrate integration between various business applications, whether legacy or modern, creating a fluid ecosystem that takes full advantage of the capabilities of low-code technology.

?In our scouting of low-code technologies, we identified Mendix platform, owned by Siemens, as the best choice. Mendix offers built-in features that provide robustness and resilience by design. It has been recognized in Gartner's quadrant for the seventh consecutive year as one of the top low-code platforms in the market and also provides vertical solutions for industries that require high complexity, such as finance, manufacturing and healthcare.

Creating robust and resilient applications with Mendix

Take an order management system as an example: a traditional, monolithic architecture makes the rapid changes required to keep up with a changing business environment is difficult, if not impossible. Frequent increases in demand, the need to update the software quickly, sometimes in real time, the ability to manage queue size or duration before it becomes a problem, and the capacity to recover quickly if a server goes down... these are all elements that affect the business model and its ability to meet user demands and expectations.

Alternative development methods such as low-code are certainly effective when it comes to moving faster and preparing the organization for the future, but they must have native robustness and resilience capabilities in order to re-architect monolithic systems into more modern microservice architectures. Creating and replicating this network of applications is much easier than traditional programming and duplication.

?But the advantage of Mendix is that it can regularly manage and optimize these microservices without downtime thanks to CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery) capabilities which enable automated and well-tested application deployments. To put it simply, changes can be made without affecting the rest of the environment, as all that’s needed is to deploy the updated application. What are the benefits??

• New updates and features can be deployed without disrupting existing operations.This provides resiliency as applications can evolve rapidly in response to new requirements or bug fixes without causing down-time.
• A CI/CD pipeline automates testing, identifying any problems before they reach production. This improves the robustness of the application, reducing the risk of critical errors by quickly identifying anomalies or conflicts.

?Mendix's native Version Control also provides traceability in managing code versions. Any changes to the code can be easily recovered in the event of a problem: so this affects both application stability and operational resilience because it facilitates roll-back to an earlier, working version.

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High Availability/Disaster Recovery built into application design

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A key differentiator of Mendix is its modular infrastructure, which allows the creation of independent modules, each benefiting of the high availability and disaster recovery capabilities provided by the platform, without the need to add additional layers of manual management. This means that both microservices and larger applications, deployed as a series of modules, are protected by these resilience solutions.?

• When we talk about high availability (HA), we refer to Mendix's ability to distribute applications across multiple servers and data centers, ensuring that they are always accessible, even if a single node or server fails. In fact, the modules created and distributed are supported by infrastructure with built-in redundancy, and downtime is minimized by distributing loads across multiple servers.
• When we talk about Disaster Recovery (DR), we refer to Mendix's ability to provide a robust backup and recovery system that ensures rapid recovery of applications and data. This means that every component or service, regardless of its complexity or function, is protected by backup strategies that enable fast recovery of operational status.

In addition, as we have already mentioned, each module can be upgraded or deployed automatically and securely, with business continuity plans integrating HA/DR strategies. This ensures that modules are available, easily recoverable in case of failure, and can be updated without compromising the resilience of the entire system.

A path to overhaul one's architectures in order to provide greater assurance of robustness and resilience goes through an analysis of the inputs/outputs and processes that one wants to optimize, followed by deploying a network of applications configured ad hoc on Mendix technology. The platform's native capabilities ensure high availability and rapid recovery in case of unforeseen events. Remember that the CI/CD pipeline also enables proactive management of any issues, allowing updates and revisions to be made without disrupting the system while it’s running.

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Would you like to increase the robustness and resilience of your application fleet? Contact us at [email protected] for a consultation!