Johannesburg, 18 Oct 2022
Building cloud-native Web and mobile applications using Amazon Web Services (AWS) allows organisations to be more agile and innovative, while slashing their costs.
This is according to speakers participating in a webinar hosted by First Distribution, AWS and BCX on developing and modernising applications purpose-built to run in the cloud.
Basil Parker, lead architect for cloud services at BCX’s EXA division, said: “Within our teams at BCX we are very enthusiastic about cloud technology. There is no doubt that cloud is the new normal. If you look at how companies are trying to compete with start-ups, they cannot depend on legacy systems any longer. In almost every customer discussion, and every solution we design, there is always a cloud component – it becomes the nexus of the service. There is growing maturity from cloud providers and adoption, and in our opinion, AWS is leading the market.”
BCX has been an AWS partner for almost three years, with capabilities including cloud migration, application development, integration, access management and security management.
Parker said some of the business benefits of cloud-native infrastructure were the ability to go global quickly, agility and staff productivity, cost reduction, improved security and operational resilience, automatic scaling, and smaller teams. He cited one major organisation that had more than halved their current on-premises spend by moving to the cloud and modernising the application.
“With a move to cloud, IT spend will come down, but when moving to cloud-native, costs and revenue models flip completely, meaning you can experiment, innovate and fail fast. You can supply new services to customers and only pay once they use that,” Parker said.
He explained that cloud-native, cloud-first or event-driven architecture is different from infrastructure lifted and shifted to the cloud. “If you simply move workloads to the cloud, you have to build in scale and understand how the workload will scale. If it’s cloud-native, that is taken care of automatically. Cloud-native is modular and offers elasticity, security, microservices, immutable infrastructure, APIs and service mesh.”
“Cloud-native is a paradigm shift that takes a whole new way of thinking about design. You need to design with functions and microservices in mind, and you need to decouple everything,” he said.
He added: “It is very important to use the right database and look at search patterns – many customers are paying too much for their databases. With cloud-native, security becomes a service, and there is less work involved. The big lessons we learned in cloud-native development was to still follow the agile software development lifecycle process. We found there was initial hesitance, but our developers became more productive. We rolled out ten environments in a month with a focused team. One of the big benefits of going cloud-native is that you can now fail fast – you’ll find you can experiment and innovate easier.
AWS Amplify fuels development success
Given the rapid pace of the digital economy, web and mobile applications demand millisecond latency, scalability and a capability to function on hundreds of devices worldwide with zero downtime – a prime reason why application developers need the right speed to market driven by rich features, said Lunga Zonke, cloud solutions architect at the AWS Enterprise Solutions Architecture team in Johannesburg.
He outlined how AWS Amplify, with features including Amplify Hosting, Amplify Libraries, Amplify CLI and Amplify Studio more than addresses these needs.
“Through this toolbox, we provide front-end developers with a fast and easy way to create cloud and mobile applications,” said Zonke. “It is important that developers get the support they need across the development life cycle from building, to shipping and to scaling.
With Amplify, developers can easily configure an application back end, build features and connect those backends to the front-end all configured correctly and ready to push live. “For delivering or shipping your app in just a few clicks, you can set up web deployment, which hosts the static website and single page web apps (SPA) with a Git-based workflow. Amplify is the fastest way to build extensible full-stack web and mobile apps,” Zonke said.
He says the undifferentiated heavy lifting is abstracted, making development easy and intuitive. “You can focus on your use case and configure AWS back-ends fast and seamlessly connect them to the front-ends.”
He highlighted features including authentication, dataStore, storage, API, geo, analytics, PubSub, predictions, interactions, notifications and extensibility.
“The new Amplify Studio lets developers create front-end UI’s visually to save time and reduce the coding necessary. Amplify’s benefits include agility, innovation and differentiation, and lower TCO.”
Since AWS is usage based, Zonke noted the importance of understanding and measuring expected usage and to be able to track this against required services. Although this can often seem like a cumbersome calculation, Zonke said: “AWS does offer a pricing calculator to give an indication of what the cost would look like on AWS. We also have a free tier that helps startups who can run for up to a year without paying for certain services, as well as PoC funding on new migration and modernisation initiatives,” he said.
Katlego Sekete, CEO of Baadaye digital agency outlined how her agency built a new platform on AWS. “One of the solutions we built with AWS is Humanize, a crowdfunding platform that helps remote and underrepresented schools to advertise their fundraising requests as campaigns to corporate funders. AWS works for us because we pay only for what we need, without requiring long-term contracts or complex licensing. It offers scalability, which is important as we aim to onboard at least 5 000 government-funded schools and 50 corporates by 2025. It is also secure, which is necessary because the platform will handle customer data and monetary transactions,” Sekete said.
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