As a business leader, you probably spend a lot of time considering how you can consistently deliver value to your customers and stay on the leading edge. Key to these goals is maintaining a high level of business agility. 

If you are a larger organization, you most likely function with a hybrid cloud environment, utilizing an infrastructure that’s a combination of public cloud, private cloud, and on-premise IT. And the larger your enterprise, the more complex your app development needs are likely to be. 

In that environment, it’s important to have a user-centric approach and to structure your organization to respond to their needs quickly. 

Here are 5 key imperatives for hybrid cloud app development. 

1. Innovate

It’s not very surprising that a key to your ability to meet evolving user needs is innovation. But as much as we all understand our need to innovate, we often aren’t sure how to get there. The recipe for innovation can be summarized this way. Know yourself, know your customer, and try things--often. 

One way to innovate is through the creation of new things: new features or new apps that rise to the emerging needs of users. Another way is to improve on the existing experiences you currently offer, refining them to make them more intuitive and personalized to the user. 

One way to accomplish both these kinds of innovations is through restructuring your organization and giving smaller teams complete control over individual aspects of the experience. These could be new features that will be added to your base applications, or they could be functionality that your app already offers. 

The best way to accomplish this organization structure is by utilizing micro frontends.

2. Accelerate

Another imperative for modern app development is discerning when it’s best for your internal team to build the tools, frameworks, or platforms you need, and when it’s better to buy. 

Oftentimes, within an enterprise, a strong bias against using anything that wasn’t built within the company exists. And certainly you want to ensure that any platform or service you buy fits into the specific needs of your organization. But this isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. As a business leader, you need to seek balance between building, buying, and renting so that you can move quickly while using your resources efficiently. 

This is where a platform like Entando can really help your organization. 

You can build your own platform or workflow for developing apps with micro frontends and microservices and deploying them in a Kubernetes environment, while also supporting identity and content management. But if a great platform exists in open source and has enterprise support and services, it may be a better use of your time to focus on building your user-facing applications rather than investing your team’s time and resources into building the support systems that serve as the foundation for those projects. 

3. Automate the Business

In order to consistently innovate quickly, you need to make sure you automate your repeatable business processes. You’ll want to focus on tools like A/B testing, big data and analytics to help you make data-driven decisions. To support this, you can leverage hybrid cloud to remove the need to build on premise data lakes to support big data initiatives. This means you’ll need to consider where your data should be stored. 

Once data capture and data analytics are available, you can use dashboarding and data aggregation tools to support business decisions. Cloud-native apps can integrate with these data sets as you bring new offerings to your stakeholders.

4. Automate IT

Equally important to business automation is automation of your enterprise IT. And you can’t really have a conversation about IT automation without talking about modern DevOps. 

The definition of DevOps will vary slightly from one organization to the next--and sometimes not so slightly. However many share common guiding principles. For example, investing in environment orchestration, auto-scaling and auto-healing infrastructures, and configuration management are all key. You might also consider utilizing Ansible, Helm, or OpenShift to ensure your organization is maximizing your Kubernetes infrastructure. 

By leveraging IT automation, your organization will be able to deliver more value to the business for much less and at a much more rapid pace. Scaling your business capabilities doesn’t always need to mean scaling your IT investment, if you’ve already set the right systems in place.

5. Modularize

Modularity is something that has been evolving through the years as large scale app development has moved away from the large monolithic structures of the past. 

Linux containers have taken the ideas of virtualization and revolutionized deployment strategies and enabled the cloud in all of its forms. Smart enterprises are taking that trend and extending it throughout the development lifecycle. 

The best way to do this is by building your applications with microservices and micro frontends, deployed in containers. A microservice architecture is well suited for large enterprises, where the need to simplify the management of thousands of backend services makes the cost of switching architectures worth the effort. And micro frontends avoid the problem of a frontend monolith as your applications grow more complex.

This kind of modularity opens up options. Hybrid cloud can also give you competitive advantages since you can adjust to match the business needs of the day. At Entando, we help you go one step further and share components across the enterprise using standard Kubernetes techniques via the Entando Component Repository.

Build better apps faster with Entando.

When release cycles take months instead of weeks, your business is left unable to deliver modern online experiences. Development and deployment bottlenecks slow your ability to make application updates, keeping you from iterating and innovating. And outdated or clunky UX keeps you from winning customers over and retaining them.

So that’s why we created a platform to help you get your ideas to market faster.

Entando is the leading micro frontend platform for building enterprise web apps on Kubernetes. We want to change the way enterprises think about building their apps, sites, and portals in order to innovate more quickly.

With Entando, you can:

• Leverage customized blueprints using the Entando Component Generator (built on JHipster) to quickly create micro frontends and assemble them into an app.
• Reuse UI/UX components across multiple projects via the Entando Component Repository, saving money and increasing development speed. 
• Scale apps quickly and effectively with Entando’s custom Kubernetes operator, automating the deployment of high availability, self-healing applications. 
• Centrally manage user roles with Entando Identity Management (built on Keycloak).

Entando is open source with available enterprise support and services. Begin developing on the platform today, and get a quote to see how our team can help your enterprise build better apps, sites, and portals--faster.