Bi-annual report from global software consultancy also highlights the rise of the “platform team”
Today, Thoughtworks, a global software consultancy, released Volume 24 of Technology Radar, which urges enterprises to carefully consider their choice of cloud features, amid increasing availability of consolidated toolsets.
As cloud platforms mature, providers are offering more bundles of tools for managing cloud development and deployment — tools designed for artifact repositories, source control, CI/CD pipelines, wikis, and more. This aggregation of tools undoubtedly provides convenience for developers and procurement teams, however, these bundles are unlikely to represent the best choice across the board.
“There is definitely value in these consolidated toolsets, which theoretically, should work together nicely and complement each other”, said Dr. Rebecca Parsons, chief technology officer at Thoughtworks. “However, there are also occasions where a best-of-breed approach is more appropriate. For instance, if you want the flexibility to swap your workloads between cloud providers, not being locked into one set of tools helps.”
Technology Radar Vol. 24 also highlights these noteworthy themes:
Platform Teams Drive Speed to Market
Increasingly, organizations are adopting a “platform team” concept. This typically consists of a dedicated group that creates and supports internal platform capabilities to accelerate application development, reduce operational complexity, and improve time to market.
Perennially “Too Complex To Blip”
Many of the complex topics considered for inclusion in the Radar end up being classified “TCTB — too complex to blip”. And often, these topics recur perennially; including monorepos, orchestration guidelines for distributed architectures and branching models. Like many topics in software development, too many trade-offs exist to allow clear, unambiguous advice.
Discerning the Context for Architectural Coupling
The topic of appropriate level of coupling in software architecture, between microservices, components, API gateways, integration hubs, and frontends is always of great interest. But there will never be one right answer: decisions must be made on a case-by-case basis, rather than seeking a generic, but inadequate, solution.
Visit Thoughtworks.com/radar to explore the interactive version of the Radar or download the PDF version.