Unlike the traditional monolithic architecture, which iscomposed of a bulky application, a microservices architecture provides a single application with smaller services that communicate with each other. It helps teams code better, use other components flexibly, and optimize resource and cost distribution in applications.
As an expert in cloud-based operations, GlobalLogic has worked on numerous cloud-based microservices architectures for leading businesses across the globe. In this white paper, we have researched the most popular open source tools to help you auto-scale your microservices. By assessing these tools and the various methods of elastic auto-scaling, we provide a guide to help readers select the best scaling process for their unique project.
Along with information on concepts of backpressure and congestion, we have also provided details on distributed queuing systems such as Kafka to help readers manage their microservices architecture to improve the project scalability and results.
K4Connect is a mission-driven technology company that integrates the best in technology to serve and empower older adults and those living with disabilities. GlobalLogic recently collaborated with K4Connect to develop its new K4Community Plus resident-facing application, which is part of the company’s holistic Smart Senior Living Community solution. K4Community Plus helps community residents and staff use technology to stay connected, enhance overall engagement, stay informed and improve wellness.
In this GlobalLogic Cafe session, GlobalLogic’s CMO, Arya Barirani, and COO, Nitesh Banga speak with K4Connect’s CEO and Co-Founder, Scott Moody about the process of building a smart application for older adults and those living with disabilities — especially in the midst of COVID-19.
The banking sector has undergone an amazing transformation in the past five years. Global banks and financial services firms are in heated competition with disruptive, digitally-native companies. They also continue to contend with traditional competitors as they attempt to engage, serve, and retain a highly diverse set of customers who span multiple generations and varying digital maturities. So, what will the next 5 years hold for the banking industry? What services will we see emerge? Which technologies and digital skill sets will be needed to fuel this innovation? Enrique Ramos O'Reilly, Director of LatAm and Caribbean at Temenos, will talk us through this amazingly rich and complex landscape.
Software products evolve as per the needs of the consumers, business goals and advances in technology. There is a compelling need to modernize and reinvent existing mobile applications by applying design thinking and using new generation toolkits. At the same time it's key that there is a suitable reuse of components of the existing application. This ensures that time to launch gets shortened and overall risk reduced. These aspects are even more important for a healthcare mobile application as the industry is regulated.
Learn an easier, better way to architect complex, life-critical medical mobile apps and submit them to the FDA. In this #TechThursday webcast, we’ll show you how to successfully migrate from legacy iOS and Android apps to the cross-platform Google Flutter framework.
Our speaker, Andriy Hirnyk, is a Software Mobile Architect at GlobalLogic with more than 12 years of core software development experience across multiple technologies. He has hands-on experience in architecting complex mobile applications across native Android , iOS and cross platform toolkits like Google Flutter. He has also worked extensively in developing Class III , Class II healthcare mobile applications and has understanding of US FDA submission process.
There is a thought experiment in game theory describing why competing businesses tend to “cluster.” They sometimes cluster physically, by locating close together—as in the case of gas stations, fast food restaurants or hotels—or else they cluster by attempting to neutralize the other’s differentiators by responding in kind. This is sometimes called the “gas station” or “hot dog stand” game.
The basic idea is that by moving closer to your competitor, you can take away some of their customers while keeping your own. This process tends to continue until everyone is in the same place: geographically, in terms of product offerings, or in terms of behaviors.
This leads me to believe that, post-COVID, business travel will rebound, and people will gradually return to offices.
Like many in my company and industry, I was a frequent business traveller pre-COVID, clocking a couple of hundred thousand miles annually. While not as many miles as some, my trips also tended to be of reasonably long duration because I was generally leading a multi-day workshop or some other hands-on activity with our clients, not just in-and-out for a quick meeting. This means that in addition to airplanes, I spent a lot of time in hotels, too.
Pre-COVID, I generally traveled every week. However, post-COVID, I haven’t been on a plane since the end of February—closing in on 5 months and counting. And like many who have found themselves “working from home” for prolonged periods of time due to COVID, I have—thankfully—found ways to do my job effectively (I like to think) without any travel at all.
So when the scourge of COVID is no longer forcing us to stay home, will we choose to work from home anyway? Many of us have proved conclusively that we can do the job without travel and without even a physical presence in an office building. So will we?
I don’t think so, and the reason is the “hotdog stand game."
The Biology of the Business Meeting
The human organism evolved, obviously, prior to the invention of Zoom and other unified communication technologies. It turns out that the biology of physical meetings is much more involved than, as a “digital” guy, I ever would have supposed. In-person, our heart rates tend to synchronize as we establish trust. Our micro-expressions (facial expressions that last for a small fraction of a second) and other physical signals are noted and processed unconsciously. Our bodies unknowingly exchange chemical signals that express emotions, such as a willingness to co-operate. A face-to-face meeting is quite a complex “soup” of chemical and physical signals that goes far beyond the overt content of the meeting.
Some of these signals can of course be captured online, now or in an imaginable future. And we can make some behavior changes ourselves to adapt to the limitations of current technology. For example, we can learn to give some of the signals explicitly that we would normally give implicitly in a traditional face-to-face meeting, like, “I didn’t understand that—can you please talk more slowly?”
I find myself being more direct online sometimes than I typically would be in person; you might have found yourself making similar adaptations. However, it’s hard to claim our technology has surpassed 200k years of evolution (for us anatomically modern humans) in terms of basic human emotions, like establishing trust. I think we have to give the advantage here to the biology of physical meetings, now and for a long time to come.
This leads us back to our “hotdog stand game.”
Is In-Person Advantageous?
As COVID restrictions loosen, suppose you perceive a colleague or competitor as winning some advantage through spending time in the office, or by having a face-to-face conversation with a prospect. Perhaps it’s getting the green-light for a new initiative, getting a promotion, or making a sale. What is your next move? I think most of us would likely respond by spending more time in the office or seeking a face-to-face sales meeting if we believe this was an important factor in the other party’s success.
Note that the face-to-face contact doesn’t really need to be an important factor—we and the other party simply have to believe it is. The other party’s response to our response is then to amplify his or her own desire for more time in the physical office or more face-to-face sales meetings, and so on. Eventually, we “meet in the middle” until we either are back in the office full-time and traveling as much as we did before COVID—or until there is no perceived advantage in doing any more.
Social behaviors have tremendous momentum, underscored by biological processes and hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. Seeking face-to-face contact with those having power over our lives—whether they were tribal elders, religious figures, kings, executives, or potential partners—has probably been a driver in society at least since “mitochondrial Eve” emerged about 200,000 years ago.
Working in close proximity to others, and to those who have power over us, is a behavior that dates back tens of thousands of years, to the invention of agriculture and probably before. As long as people still perceive that face-to-face contact is key for developing collaborative working relationships, establishing mutual trust around shared objectives, or “closing the deal,” then face-to-face contact will resume at some level as soon as it again becomes possible. And, because of the “hotdog stand” paradigm, I believe all of us will revert to close to pre-COVID levels over time—because in a competitive environment, things converge to the middle.
I'm Choosing Virtual for 2020 (and Maybe 2021)
There’s no doubt in my mind that where we have learned that new technologies enable us to do things better than we could conventionally, those technologies will be whole-heartedly adopted post-COVID. For example, I have learned that “virtual” is a better means of technical information-gathering when architecting new products than most in-person discussions. I’ll use virtual for that post-COVID. I also think we’ll find more flexible ways of working and alternative means to do some of the things that used to require travel. However, there will be continuing pressure to locate our “hotdog stand” closer to our colleagues and competitors.
I don’t expect that I will qualify for my normal “frequent flyer” and “frequent guest” loyalty programs this year, at least evaluated against the mileage / nights stayed standards of previous years. I think in the year 2021 I might qualify again, though I expect I’ll be traveling less than I did pre-COVID. But I’m pretty sure that by 2022, I’ll be back to just about my previous levels, all things being equal. And back in the office as well.
Today is the first day I’ve set foot GlobalLogic’s Silicon Valley headquarters building since the lock-down started in early March.
For the last four-and-a-half months, like many of us, I’ve been working from home. While I live in a suburb less than 15 miles / 25 km from the office, it seems like a different world. We haven’t re-opened the office yet, but today I went in to pick up a much anticipated new laptop. I could have had it mailed to me, but honestly I was curious about the office and—hard-core techy that I am—I didn’t want to wait the extra day it would take get my new machine through the post.
When I arrived at headquarters, the parking lot was deserted and the much-coveted parking spaces in front of the main entrance were all vacant. I didn’t need to worry about social distancing in the elevator because I was the only one IN the elevator—or in the building lobby, for that matter. When I got to the floor where our reception desk is located, I was eagerly greeted by our receptionist who was one of only two people in the entire office that day. The other was the IT person who received and had done his IT magic on my new laptop.
The only reason these two people were in the office is to receive physical things and forward them on. The receptionist receives physical packages from FedEx and other delivery services that are addressed to the office, and forwards these on to the relevant person. The IT person receives incoming hardware, configures it, and sends it on to the user. He told me that he could do this from home, but it was a big hassle to change the delivery point on our corporate accounts so he just comes in a few hours a day. He said that social distancing was not a problem with two people in an office environment that can accommodate hundreds.
It was eerie being in a place where so much of importance has happened, and seeing hardly any people. Our CEO and the rest of the executive team all have their offices near my own, but no one was there. My office was exactly the way I left it in March, with Perrier bottles still on my desk waiting to be consumed, and a clutter of post-it notes waiting to remind me of things to do. With no disrespect intended to our Ukrainian colleagues, my first thought was that this looked like Chernobyl without the dust: like everyone just dropped what they were doing, and left.
And, in fact, that is exactly what happened: when the lockdown order came we all just stayed home, between one day and the next. The office is as we left it in March; the only sign of habitation is it’s clearly been maintained and dusted by the custodial staff, because it’s stayed very clean.
Thriving in Isolation: Luck, Preparation, or Both?
When I talk to people about the impact of the lockdown on GlobalLogic they are surprised to hear that 93% of our staff was working from home within a week of the lockdown, and the 98% within two weeks.
We have not (knock on wood) missed a single deliverable; instead, we have been ramping up new projects. While we’re always conscious that we are NOT in control of the COVID situation and its ultimate outcome, we are also very thankful that we have been able to keep our people fully and productively employed, while also keeping our commitments to our clients—both old and new.
People have asked me how this is even remotely possible. Like most successes, I attribute our smooth and continuing operation during the previous 4.5 months of the lockdown to a combination of good planning, hard work, experience and luck.
While I was well aware of our disaster planning in general, I had no idea that we even had a “pandemic plan.” Sure enough, we did. I credit our Facilities, HR, Delivery and IT teams with surprising far-sightedness. Who among us would have even conceived of a global pandemic causing a world-wide lock-down several years ago, when most of these disaster plans were created? I certainly would not have taken the idea seriously, even as late as this January, and I’m generally not accused of a lack of imagination.
Advantage #1: Held to High Standards
One “luck” part of this preparedness comes from the fact that we do mission-critical work for very large, very sophisticated global customers who hold us (GlobalLogic) to a very high standard. Among other areas (security being another notable one), they review and test our disaster response regularly, as part of their own disaster preparedness. Our plans were therefore vetted and informed by the “best of the best” in the software industry and, thank goodness, when push came to shove they actually worked.
Advantage #2: Globally Distributed
The nature of our business is another area where we got “lucky.” We are a global software business; we operate and do software development work in multiple countries and multiple time zones routinely. This means that collaboration between distributed teams was already part our DNA; it’s not something we had to learn post-COVID.
Also, a bit less obviously, nearly all of our engineers have always needed to be able to take calls and work from home during “off hours” in their local time zones. This is because of global time zones; nothing to do with COVID. When it’s 9am on the US West Coast, it is 9:30pm or 10:30pm in India, and 7pm in Eastern Europe—so an engineer will often take meetings from home when collaborating with colleagues and clients in the US. Even within the US, distributed meetings and working are common.
The upshot of being globally distributed is that all of our management team and nearly all of our engineers already had the ability to work from home—in fact, to work from anywhere, as frequent travel is also part of being a global business. We were therefore “lucky” in the sense that our business already acted like a globally distributed entity pre-COVID. What COVID did for us was cut off our other alternatives—physical meetings and travel were now out. But working distributed ‘from anywhere’ was something we were used to from long experience, so we were able to continue working in what to us was already a normal fashion.
Advantage #3: Previous Experience with Global Crises
While I would in no way frame it as “luck,” we also learned from our experience with the Russian incursions into Ukraine in 2014. While, again, we did not miss any deliverables out of our Eastern European centers during the 2014 crisis, we faced at that time the very real prospect of disaster overtaking our Ukrainian development centers. We formulated and rapidly implemented a robust disaster mitigation strategy for geopolitical risk first in Ukraine, and then in our centers world-wide. This included equipping engineers with laptops and the ability to work remotely even when not required for their day-to-day work, among other measures. Many of the measures we took to mitigate geopolitical risk are helping us today in our pandemic response by enabling decentralized work.
Advantage #4: Up-to-Date Infrastructure
Another piece of ‘luck’—though hats off to the IT people who made it happen—is that we’ve kept up-to-date with our infrastructure. We migrated all our productivity and software tools infrastructure into the cloud many years ago, except for a handful of legacy systems that are hosted and remotely administered. This move had nothing to do with COVID, but we are certainly reaping the benefits now. When I talked with our IT guy in the office this morning, he actually had no need to be there to manage any physical servers. Except for receiving physical shipments of laptops in the mail, he had no need to be physically in the office at all.
While a very large portion of our software development work is done in the cloud or with remote web-based tools, GlobalLogic also does work on physical devices: cars, medical equipment, communications equipment and the like. We also have some designers and content engineers who need special equipment—such as very large monitors—for their jobs. For those systems that cannot be accessed remotely, in most cases we were able (with the client’s permission) to relocate this specialized equipment into people’s homes. While I haven’t seen it, I’m pretty sure a number of our embedded engineers have the ‘infotainment’ systems of upcoming car models parked on their dining room tables. Kudos to the engineers and families who are hosting physical equipment in their apartments or homes during the lock-down. Those of us, like myself, who deal mainly with virtual systems have it much easier.
We're All In This Together
The ‘hard work’ part of GlobalLogic’s successful response to the last 4.5 months of the COVID crisis has come from all of us together—both GlobalLogic employees and our clients. Our whole business model relies on client intimacy, and on the Client and GlobalLogic acting as a single team. I personally have been working as closely with clients throughout the whole crisis as I ever have—though virtually for the moment, of course. So has just about everyone in GlobalLogic. Without exception, these client interactions have been terrific. Whether we are badged as a GlobalLogic employee or a client employee, we all know that we are in this together. It’s part of our DNA to see our client’s success as GlobalLogic’s success, and I get the sense most clients see GlobalLogic’s successful response to COVID as key to their own as well.
Returning to GlobalLogic’s almost empty Silicon Valley headquarters today shook me a little bit. Seeing the empty offices of the people I work with every day, our executives and staff, was unnerving. But I exchanged messages with our CEO just yesterday. I interacted with much of the rest of the executive team, and a number of engineers and other leaders, multiple times this week. I interact with my admin, Jackie, multiple times a day. And I’m working with clients just as closely (virtually) as I ever have. True, I’m not sitting next to them—but we’re still connected.
It struck me very strongly that GlobalLogic is not a physical place; it’s not our headquarters in Silicon Valley or the dozens of buildings we occupy around the world. It’s the relationships and collaboration we have with each other, and with our clients. Those are as strong as ever, even as the buildings stand empty.
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt businesses across all sectors, it has become abundantly clear that a company's adoption of digital tools and workflows can make the difference between future success and eventual failure.
There are a number of paths to digital transformation, but they all start where you are today. Which path you choose depends on where you are, both internally and externally, and on the economics and risk tolerance of your company.
In this white paper, Dr. Jim Walsh (CTO, GlobalLogic) explains how to wisely allocate finite economic resources like time, money, teams, and market attention in order to achieve a desired future goal in the presence of competing priorities and constraints. Learn about the three most prominent approaches to digital transformation and how to select the best one based on your business' technical, operational, and economic variables.
Beyond the tragic human loss, and the devastation of the global economy, COVID-19 will continue to shape the future of how we live and work and relate to each other for many years to come. This session will explore the technology transformations that will be necessary for humans and businesses in the post COVID world. Our speakers will look at key industries and how they will be transformed by the new normals created in such a short period of the Pandemic.
Learn (1) how COVID successfully targets non-digital organizations, (2) which key technologies will become pervasive in the post-COVID world, and (3) how organizations can accelerate their digital agendas in the midst of a pandemic.
With over 30 years of software development experience in companies like Apple, NeXT, and PegaSystems, speaker Jim Walsh brings a wealth of deep technology experience and software development know-how to our audience. As GlobalLogic’s CTO, Jim is responsible for leading GlobalLogic’s horizontal technology practices, technical advisory services, and solution accelerator initiatives.
Raj Bhandari (Industrial Business Unit Head, GlobalLogic) discusses the advantages and technologies of Industry 4.0, focusing on digital twin technology and how businesses can start implementing it.
In the highly competitive market of the OTT industry — where the big players like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Spotify are leading the race with a wide variety of content and immersive UI/UX experiences — setting oneself apart from other players requires an effort to understand the audience and truly cater to their needs and preferences.
The success of any OTT platform depends on these key factors: content, discovery, user interface, and user experience. Personalization — the ability to understand the audience and serve them relevant content — targets all these factors. Learn more about how to develop a successful personalization strategy for OTT and which tools and technologies to leverage for implementation.
