Software can solve business problems, it can increase efficiency to reduce operating costs and increase revenue, but only if it works.
Consider the infrastructure that keeps the people of Toronto moving, living, and thriving (let’s skip over the Gardiner for the purpose of this example). I’m referring to the roadways, transit, libraries, schools, and hospitals that keep Torontonians mobile and healthy.
Building software is a lot like a city. Cities are a complicated set of moving parts that need organization and basic rules and regulations -- like stoplights and railway tracks -- to keep everyone moving. Not only that, they also combine physical and social elements.
Software can solve business problems, it can increase efficiency to reduce operating costs and increase revenue, but only if it works. But, like a city, in order to be successful, every solution needs infrastructure -- the foundation on which we build applications.
When software was first built, and up until the early 2000s, IT teams would make purchase orders for physical hardware that would be delivered and configured for their clients.
Procurement and purchasing could take months and no code could be written in the meantime.
Fast forward to 2017 and we have high-grade, professional services available to us on demand so that we can pay for infrastructure space on someone else’s hardware. In a matter of hours, we can set up a virtual environment and start building cloud-native software, immediately.
The speed at which we can build software is accelerating. Architech has brought to life a technology strategy that can consistently spin up an environment in as little as 15 minutes. We build it in such a way that we can watch the infrastructure performance in real-time and reduce the system downtime to less than a few minutes a month.
Now, let's go back to the idea of the foundation and infrastructure of a city mirroring software. Imagine standing on top of the CN tower and being able to predict traffic surges and redirect congestion before any traffic volume build up even happens. Imagine being able to fill pot holes as they form and perform preventive maintenance, on demand. Imagine what it would mean if you could add extra highways and transit almost instantaneously, out of thin air, and for only as long as they were needed so that no one ever sat in bumper to bumper traffic jams.
Flexible infrastructure makes all of this possible in software development and it means that cloud solutions are dynamic, reliable, and resilient. It’s the way we like to build.
