10 Best Practices in Modern App Development

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Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Modern Application Development | Enterprise Apps | US Based App Development Team

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, developing robust, scalable, and efficient applications is more critical than ever. At Web Experts, we’ve had the privilege of working with a diverse range of clients, from small businesses to large enterprises. Our portfolio includes creating a sophisticated procurement system for Grady and a comprehensive healthcare application for Epic. These projects have equipped us with invaluable insights and experience in modern app development, allowing us to deliver top-notch solutions tailored to our clients’ unique needs.

Whether you’re a startup looking to build your first app or a large corporation aiming to modernize your existing systems, understanding the best practices in modern app development is essential. In this post, we’ll delve into the key principles and strategies that drive successful app development, ensuring your projects are efficient, scalable, and future-proof.

What is Modern App Development?

Modern app development transcends traditional coding practices, encompassing the entire software delivery lifecycle. It emphasizes cloud-first and container-based approaches, leveraging automated and repeatable processes for testing, validation, builds, and monitoring. By breaking down applications into composable and modular services, modern app development maximizes flexibility and allows different teams to work on various components simultaneously.

Why Embrace Modern App Development?

Adopting modern app development practices can significantly reduce friction for your team, enabling faster code deployment and fostering innovation. These practices also enhance reliability, minimizing the chances of changes causing issues. In the event of a problem, streamlined deployment processes allow for quick fixes, ensuring your application remains stable and responsive.

1. Design Stateless Services

A stateless service is a software component that does not retain any information about previous requests. Decoupling these services from each other enhances scalability and resiliency. Stateless services make it easier to test and debug components independently, enabling rapid changes and deployment.

2. Design for Scale

Applications must be designed to scale to provide consistent user experience under varying loads. This involves planning for both horizontal and vertical scaling. Horizontal scaling adds more instances, while vertical scaling adds resources to existing instances. Using auto-scaling capabilities and load balancers helps manage demand efficiently.

3. Optimize Containers

Smaller containers have the advantage of faster build and startup times, as well as easier maintenance. Start with an appropriate base image and only include necessary dependencies. Keeping containers small reduces complexity and improves the maintainability of your infrastructure.

4. Infrastructure as Code (IAC)

IAC involves managing and provisioning infrastructure using code, leveraging declarative languages. This approach improves efficiency, scalability, security, and consistency by automating infrastructure provisioning and reducing human error. Popular tools for IAC include Terraform, Ansible, Chef, and Puppet.

5. Supply Chain Security

Supply chain security involves ensuring that every step of your software supply chain is secure. Tools like Cloud Build, Artifact Registry, and binary authorization help manage and secure your build artifacts, ensuring that the software you deploy is what you intended.

6. Cloud Native Release Pipelines

Using cloud-native CI/CD pipelines leverages the power of the cloud to scale builds horizontally, run multiple builds simultaneously, and maintain a consistent environment. Tools like Cloud Build and Cloud Deploy facilitate these processes, enabling efficient and secure deployment workflows.

7. Managed Services vs. Self-Managed

Using managed services can free up engineering resources to focus on business problems rather than building and operating commodity services. Managed services offer elastic scalability, high availability, and 24/7 support. However, consider factors like vendor lock-in, customization needs, and cost when deciding whether to use managed services.

8. Observability

Implementing robust observability practices helps monitor and understand your system’s behavior. Centralized logging, tracing, and actionable alerts are crucial for maintaining system health and quickly addressing issues. Tools like OpenTelemetry and centralized logging systems facilitate these practices.

9. Cost Management

Effective cost management ensures you get the most value from your cloud investment. Utilize cost attribution, monitoring, and optimization strategies, such as auto-scaling, right-sizing machine types, using spot instances, and implementing lifecycle management for resources.

10. Cloud-Based Development

Cloud-based development environments offer faster setup times, reduced costs, and improved productivity. They allow for standardized development environments, reducing “works on my machine” issues. Cloud workstations, for example, provide scalable and consistent development environments accessible from anywhere.

Key Takeaways

Modern applications require characteristics like resiliency, portability, scalability, and improved security to meet business goals. By adopting these best practices, you can ensure your applications are robust, flexible, and ready to meet the demands of today’s dynamic tech landscape. Evaluate your current state and start your modernization journey by implementing the practices that will have the most significant impact on your team and projects.

How Web Experts Can Help

At Web Experts, we specialize in guiding businesses through the complexities of modern app development. Our team of experienced professionals can help you implement these best practices, ensuring that your applications are not only up-to-date but also optimized for performance and scalability. Whether you’re starting from scratch or looking to modernize an existing application, Web Experts provides the expertise and support you need to succeed. Reach out to us to learn how we can help you transform your development process and achieve your business goals.