Meet the low code: looking at it in value

Abstract: low-code technology brings to enterprises is reflected in multiple dimensions. On the whole, it can be summarized into three categories: reducing costs, improving efficiency, and increasing value. It is described here from three perspectives: supporting enterprise innovation, supporting enterprise response to changes in demand, and supporting enterprise's flexible operation.

This article is shared from Huawei Cloud Community " Meets Low Code: Examining in Value", author: agile Xiaozhi.

The value that low-code technology brings to enterprises is reflected in multiple dimensions. On the whole, it can be summarized into three categories: reducing costs, improving efficiency, and increasing value. It is described here from three perspectives: supporting enterprise innovation, supporting enterprise response to changes in demand, and supporting enterprise's flexible operation.

Support enterprise innovation

low-code technology is suitable for supporting batch-based innovation in a low-cost manner. high-code technology is suitable for supporting leading innovations that create unique competitiveness in a high-cost manner.

Enterprise innovation values the result, that is, the ratio of input to output. To obtain uniquely competitive innovations, high-cost input is required; but more combined innovations are obtained by learning from the successful experience of others, and input costs need to be reduced, so that companies can dare to try, make short-term trials, make mistakes, and make adjustments. business.

The essence of low-code technology is to abstract and solidify various common patterns, and quickly build applications through orchestration and combination of these patterns to achieve the business goal of reducing costs, increasing efficiency and adding value. Therefore, low-code platforms are more suitable for rapid replication of borrowed innovations from existing models.

The supporting role of low-code platforms on innovation is mainly reflected in three aspects:

reduction: includes reducing labor costs and outsourcing costs. Use low-code technology to build applications, while reducing the number and skill requirements of the development team, and the natural labor cost is greatly reduced; in addition, using low-code technology can quickly tailor the application system required by the current business and reduce the dependence on finished software .

improves efficiency: The low-code platform can improve the efficiency of application construction, including shortening the learning cycle, increasing the development speed, and reducing repetitive wheels. The low-code platform can also accelerate the entire application life cycle, simplify the process of packaging, deployment, and upgrade, and increase the speed of application evolution.

value-added: low-code platform can more easily tap the value of existing systems, including aggregating existing system capabilities and using existing system data; on the other hand, it can add additional value to the built applications, including improving application quality (such as Enhance security and reliability), add additional capabilities to applications (such as automatic equipment AI capabilities); on the other hand, you can participate in the low-code platform ecology to obtain direct commercial value.

Responding to changes in demand

Changes from market demand will be implemented as changes in business scenarios or functions, which will lead to changes in the needs of the application system under construction. In different business scenarios, the business will have different variability and support provided by low code. The means are also different:

Faced with business changes in various application scenarios, low-code platforms can help companies achieve faster response and lower investment.

Support flexible operations

Low-code technology plays a big role in supporting the business continuity of an enterprise. We understand the flexible operation of an enterprise as its business continuity, that is, its resilience in resisting risks. Business continuity can be reflected in three aspects:

Health

Whether the business of the enterprise can resist the negative impact brought about by external risks. There are risks related to IT systems, such as defending against security attacks and accepting unexpected business volume; there are also risks from outside society such as the new crown epidemic and negative public opinion. These impacts may impact the business of the enterprise and fall into a "disease" state. Low-code technology has a good performance in resisting the following aspects:

Security: low-code technology can bring better security to IT systems. In particular, the low-code technology of the cloud service model has been protected in layers at the physical layer, network layer, system layer, and application layer, such as security firewalls, operating system reinforcement, key management, prevention of unauthorized CSRF attacks, and so on. At the business application level, low-code technologies help achieve business-level security through declarative security settings, such as declaring password fields, declaring sensitive information, declaring data domains, etc., without the need for application developers to write security-related code.

In addition, low-code technology also plays a very good role in protecting intellectual property rights, such as setting up a developer’s IP whitelist, application encryption and packaging, and installing applications requiring LICENSE.

Concurrency: low-code technology can cope with large concurrency and traffic fluctuations. Especially for the low-code technology of the cloud service model, the bottom layer adopts the K8S-based elastic distributed architecture, which can be scaled horizontally and elastically. Low-code technology uses a variety of caching technologies and performance load technologies at the engine layer, allowing application developers to develop high-performance and high-concurrency applications without understanding concurrency and performance technologies.

However, the short-term traffic explosion of low-code technology in specific scenarios is still in its infancy. Because different business scenarios require different short-term high-concurrency architectures, such as the same spike, the architecture for fast-moving product orders and seat ticket orders is different. Low-code technology provides a solidified general architecture pattern, and has limited support for specific scenarios.

reliability: cloud service mode low-code technology, with fault detection, automatic recovery, data backup and recovery, redundant architecture and other capabilities, without the need for application developers to pay attention to can provide high reliability guarantee.

Sustainability

Whether the business of the enterprise can continue to operate for a long time, and it will not be terminated due to some force majeure. Such as encountering natural disasters, or breaking the capital chain, or breaking the core supply chain, etc.

disaster tolerance: cloud service model low-code technology, with remote disaster tolerance capabilities.

can be accessed: supports management and developers to access the environment anytime and anywhere, such as the new crown epidemic period can be remotely developed.

can be replaced: helps enterprises unify the technology stack and reduce dependence on a single application provider. But the reliance on low-code tools themselves can also bring sustainability risks.

Growth

Whether the business of the enterprise can continue to grow and evolve. For example, the obsolescence of technology, the obsolete system, and the lack of personnel updates are likely to cause business stagnation.

application: low-code technology development applications continue to evolve and upgrade. Low-cost innovation has brought about continuous business growth.

technology: low-code platform tools will continue to evolve and upgrade to ensure that the applications built on the platform are technologically advanced.

team members: using low source technology team members, business architects towards sustainable development, product design, system analysis direction.

Challenges still facing low code

Low-code technology is still in the early stages of development, and will face many challenges in the actual promotion and application process.

1. Low-code technology is still in its infancy, and the technology and capabilities are not yet mature and comprehensive. Many existing products cannot cover end-to-end business scenarios. After researching and trying out some low-code platforms, many customers think that they can only build simple and complex applications, not the core support system, and regard the low-code platform as an auxiliary development tool rather than the main productivity tool.

2. The digital transformation of enterprises requires strong top-level business architecture design capabilities to achieve the goal of global sharing and stimulating innovation. However, most traditional enterprises lack the ability to design business architecture, which leads to the use of low-code platforms only as project development tools. Therefore, in many projects, the true value of the low-code platform has not been brought into play, and the resulting improvement effect is not eye-catching enough.

3. Low-code technology lacks a unified industry specification, and it is difficult to build a unified specification. The capabilities and methods of use of low-code platform products from different manufacturers are completely different. Therefore, the experience of developers is difficult to use across platforms, and it is even more difficult to realize the migration of developed applications between different low-code platforms. This has led to a slower pace of ecological prosperity for low-code technologies compared to high-code development languages and IDEs. Moreover, manufacturers can only develop their own ecosystems, and it is difficult to communicate between ecosystems.

Low code is not a silver bullet, nor is it a magic medicine. In the early stages of development, it inevitably faces many problems and challenges. But it does represent the trend of the next IT era, and is exuding its charm in various practical application scenarios. When we use low code to create value for enterprises, we are also embracing the next IT era.

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