How The Algorithm Economy And Containers Are Changing The Apps
Algorithmic Intelligence has been a driving force for many today’s technology companies. Understand how these organisations are using algorithms and container services for creating value from data.
Containers
Containers are changing how developers build and deploy distributed applications. In particular, containers are a form of lightweight virtualization that can hold all the application logic, and run as an isolated process with all the dependencies, libraries, and configuration files bundled into a single package that runs in the cloud.
“Instead of making an application or a service the endpoint of a build, you’re building containers that wrap applications, services, and all their dependencies,” Simon Bisson at InfoWorld said in How Containers Change Everything. “Any time you make a change, you build a new container; and you test and deploy that container as a whole, not as an individual element.”
Containers create a reliable environment where software can run when moved from one environment to another, allowing developers to write code once, and run it in any environment with predictable results — all without having to provision servers or manage infrastructure.
This is a shot across the bow for large, monolithic code bases. “[Monoliths are] being replaced by microservices architectures, which decompose large applications – with all the functionality built-in – into smaller, purpose-driven services that communicate with each other through common REST APIs,” Lucas Carlson from InfoWorld said in 4 Ways Docker Fundamentally Changes Application Development.
The hallmark of microservice architectures is that the various functions of an app are unbundled into a series of decentralized modules, each organized around a specific business capability.
Martin Fowler, the co-author of the Agile Manifesto, describes microservices as “an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API.”
By decoupling services from a monolith, each microservice becomes independently deployable, and acts as a smart endpoint of the API. “There is a bare minimum of centralized management of these services,” Fowler said in Microservices: A Definition of this New Architectural Term, “which may be written in different programming languages and use different data storage technologies.”
Similar to the algorithm economy, containers are like Legos for cloud-based application development. “This changes cloud development practices,” Carlson said, “by putting larger-scale architectures like those used at Facebook and Twitter within the reach of smaller development teams.
The algorithm economy and containers are changing the way developers build and ship code.
- The algorithm economy allows for the building blocks of algorithmic intelligence to be made accessible, and discoverable through marketplaces and communities.
- Containerizing algorithms enables them to be packaged as microservices, making them accessible via an API, and hosted on scalable, serverless infrastructure in the cloud.
Bio: Diego Oppenheimer, founder and CEO of Algorithmia, is an entrepreneur and product developer with extensive background in all things data. Prior to founding Algorithmia he designed , managed and shipped some of Microsoft’s most used data analysis products including Excel, Power Pivot, SQL Server and Power BI.
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