When building modern apps, cooperation between app designers and developers is a serious issue. And as industry stakeholders continue to study the technologies that fuel IT modernization, it’s hard to overlook modern app development. The apps have become popular because they fill a growing need for IT ethics and better user experience. However, building a modern app is a different endeavor and requires a design approach.
Coding Designers
It’s easy to assume that having a designer who knows how to code would make it easier to build designs that aren’t too technical. Some people also feel that designers should take an active role in the implementation phase. The allure of abandoning the design tools and design in code is strong.
However, the most talented designers use design tools, but the inclination has nothing to do with a lack of technical skills. While there are numerous use cases for designing in code, the convenience and level of visual creativity offered by design tools are essential. Most designers leverage design tools to sketch ideas and activate their creativity when building modern apps. Regardless of the temptation to do away with design tools and go straight to coding, the tools play a critical role in developing cloud-native apps.
Design Systems
Design systems have a special place in the app development process since they eliminate guesswork and redundancy and improve manageability and efficiency. In fact, many organizations have built better applications by taking a structured approach to design principles, components, and patterns for their products.
However, the approach may come with several hurdles since most design tools get in the way of getting a central point of truth. And in cases where the systems seem unified, they still exist in separate and incompatible sources. Unless you’re keen from the start, maintaining a balance between multiple systems can be daunting.
Combining Design and Code With UX
While UXPin tools are robust and reliable in design work, it’s not new in the industry. Nevertheless, recent developments are changing how app developers approach design tasks. The Merge capability helps designers to live components in any design without the need to code. As a result, you can achieve a seamless balance between code and design throughout the app development process.
And since modern applications often have multiple interdependent parts, the design process should eliminate repetitive tasks. Design tools help developers minimize the time taken to complete projects through automation.
Building a Solid Foundation
Application developers’ productivity is critical in the modern digital world, and containers enhance productivity during the coding process. But when you have tons of containers to deal with, Kubernetes can be invaluable. As more organizations familiarize themselves with containers and Kubernetes, they realize that customization and fine-tuning are essential for modern apps.
The approach needs a unique mindset to design distributed and API-coupled apps. And while Kubernetes is quite adaptable for various use cases, it’s essential to enable appropriate capabilities to enhance developer stability.
1. Traffic Management
Kubernetes have an inbuilt connection load balancing feature targeting Layer 4 traffic. While the proxy often switches over to layer 7 whenever no other proxies are available, this can be quite risky since L7 should only run on a request basis. To ensure proper stability, app builders adopt L4-L7 proxies known as Ingress controllers that offer better resilience, security, visibility, and monitoring.
2. Managing Identity and Security
Making Kubernetes reliable and secure for the production of modern apps requires appropriate modifications. Typically, Kubernetes rely on APIs for control and communication. Therefore, it’s critical to secure the APIs with proper access controls and authentication protocols.
It’s also vital to regulate workload capabilities or users at any given time. The idea is to set up automatic rules that will apply the desired policies on the app.
3. Visibility and Monitoring
Since modern apps consist of numerous parts, they require a non-conventional approach to implement seamless visibility and monitoring. The monitoring layer in any modern application should provide flexible and persistent visibility for each API and microservice. As such, DevOps teams must understand how the apps behave after deployment to ensure reliability. This calls for a careful integration of L4-L7 proxies, monitoring solutions, and Ingress controllers.
Success will be out of reach unless your deployment is stable, observable, predictable, and secure. Most importantly, you should excel in the four parameters if you want to launch a modern app within specific timeframes and ensure customer satisfaction, which you can do by encouraging customer feedback.
API Security Management and Performance Tuning
Proper API management is a critical aspect of scaling a modern app after development, and it can slow down your progress if you are not keen. Ideally, your design team must make it easy for the DevOps team to define, publish, and control the lifecycle of internal and external APIs.
Unfortunately, traditional API management tools are not sufficient for the rapidly evolving designs of modern applications. And that’s because they are built to handle fewer APIs on a less dynamic infrastructure. Therefore, it’s best to use a solution that can handle the granularity and scale of microservices while still ensuring a developer-friendly setup to enhance iteration and innovation.
APIs are the lifeblood of modern applications, so you need to implement proper API management on an autonomous system to keep your apps healthy and self-healing.
Enhancing Resilience
The foundation of your app must be flexible to ensure resilience since design patterns of modern applications aim to create loosely coupled, resilient, and distributed cloud apps. This means you should design a cloud-agnostic environment.
The appropriate design enables cross-environment orchestration and diversity to enhance resilience through risk distribution. Depending on service needs, you can maintain multiple warm environments that can be scaled up or down.
Also, a resilience baseline can lead to easier performance tuning, cost controls, and compliance across multiple geographic regions.
Bottom Line
App development can be a complex undertaking when the stakes are high. Modern apps are complex and often consist of multiple parts that must work together to provide seamless service, security, and customer satisfaction. The adoption of sophisticated design tools has unified design and coding to ensure better collaboration and implementation of complex ideas in a competitive landscape.
