Traditionally, businesses have bolted on, refined, added, and subtracted code to systems infrastructure. Building from this foundation was historically sensible, but it's now hampering the rapid delivery of services.

The way apps were conventionally designed can be thought of as retrieving services from a library: a two-way communication where the application searches the server-side monolith for what it needs and then delivers this back. Services are tightly coupled to centralised infrastructure and, if changes are made, a whole new library must be deployed.

Imagine, instead a constellation of nimble components, each of them performing very specific tasks, a decentralised army of microservices, fine-tuned to do their individual jobs, but all working together.

This mode of thinking, which positions developers at the centre of an organisation, is not new – agile charts back to the turn of the millennium – but now there’s more documentation on hand and better, mature tooling, so it’s much simpler to introduce processes into the pre-existing tangle of technology businesses already have in place.