Adaptation is the process by which systems evolve to better suit their environment. In this slide deck, Paul explores how businesses adapt, and how adaptive businesses are already involved in evolution and adaptation of software and applications. He examines what it means to have an adaptive application and how businesses can become more adaptive as they build digital experiences.

1. Darwin Ate My App
Adaptation and adaptability in business and software
Paul Fremantle
CTO and Co-Founder, WSO2
@pzfreo

2. “Software is eating the world”
Marc Andreessen

3. The only competitive companies
in the future are those that can build
Adaptive Digital Experiences

5. The action or process of adapting one thing
to fit with another, or suit specified
conditions, esp. a new or changed
environment

6. An Adaptive Business
• Evolves faster to market trends
• Reacts more quickly to customer demands
• Flexes and scales to meet market demand
• Creates new digital products faster
• Couples costs to workload and revenue

7. • Adapting to customers in real time
– Fraud detection, dynamic marketing, real time decision
making, etc
• Adapting to workload challenges
– Scaling different parts of the business as needed
– Consumption-based cost models
• Adapting to changing business needs
– Fast evolution of business processes and digital products
Dimensions of Business Adaptation

10. (Biological) Adaptation
• Adaptation occurs in any system that has
– Iteration / Generations
– Selection process between generations

11. Genetic Algorithms
• Dates back to Alan Turing in
1950, who first proposed this
• The aerial shown was
designed by a genetic
algorithm and used on
NASA’s ST-5 spacecraft

12. We are all involved in multiple
meta genetic algorithms
aka (biological) adaptation
processes

13. A-B testing
Implements biological
adaptation
A B25%
43%

14. Implements
biological adaptation
v0.1 v0.2
Version Control

15. - Vertical gene transfer is from
parents to children
- In code that means from
one version to the next
- Horizontal gene transfer is
from one cell to another
- In code that means from
one codebase to another

17. Speed of Evolution

18. Speed of Evolution
• In any such adaptive system, the rate of
adaptation is based on:
– The rate of creation of new generations
– The time for selection to kick in

19. Fruit flies

20. Adaptive Businesses
rely on
Adaptive Technologies

21. Adaptive technologies
• Act in real-time
– On events, streaming data, patterns and behaviour
• React to demand directly
– Scaling as needed
– Independently scaling different parts of the system
• Help organisations reduce the time between
evolutions
– Faster iteration
– Effective observability and testing

22. • Version controlled
revisions
– Iterations
• Automated Unit Tests
– Fast Selection
For example
Continuous Integration
Continuous
Integration
Check In
Unit Test
Build
System
Test
Deploy

24. Chaos Engineering enhances
selection of software

25. Abstractions and Complexity
http://dafoster.net/articles/2017/03/25/how-to-design-large-programs-with-abstraction-and-encapsulation/
With Abstraction Without Abstraction

27. 27

28. Why use {API, Event, Stream} architecture?
• APIs provide an abstraction over everything
that can be queried or activated
• Events allow action in real-time based on the
environment, allowing work to be triggered
• Streams capture the ongoing evolving nature of
the environment, allowing pattern matching
and analysis

29. StubHub is an adaptive business

30. TfL is an adaptive business

31. Uber is an adaptive business*
Greyball
• Actively identifies
government officials
• Offers an adapted view
to them
* This may not be strictly legal!

32. Jaguar Land Rover is an adaptive business

33. Abstractions manage complexity,
but without governance,
that complexity bites back

34. Governance
… is the intersection of people and technology

35. Governance in our world
• Store / Registry
– configuration and human interface
• Identity Management
– for people and systems
• Runtime policy
– gateway and enforcement
• Observability and monitoring
– visibility and control

36. {APIs, Events, Streams} ×
{Store, Identity,
Runtime Policy,
Observability}

38. Recursive architecture
• Every time you consume an API, Event or
Stream you create a new API, Event, or Stream
–In Ballerina, one-step process for APIs
–In Siddhi, one-step process for streams and events
All our products will move from two-step to one-step

40. What is an Adaptive Application?
• Creates and Consumes APIs, Events, and Streams
– Acts on and adapt to real time data
• Scales up and down instantly
– Fast startup, stateless, low memory
– Reincarnation is welcome to any individual instance
• Built with the right programming model
– Time to value is important
– But time to adapt is more important
• Observable by default

41. • Language Runtime
– Improved worker semantics
– Functions on types
– Modularity with ‘public’ / ‘private’ package members.
– Resiliency for network failures
• Developer Tools
– Composer: browser based graphic/text/swagger editor and
debugger
– IDE plugins: IntelliJ Idea
– Testerina: Unit testing framework
Ballerina v0.95.0 Technology Preview

42. Observability
42

43. Observability
● Observability is monitoring, testing and business analytics together
● Understanding the whole picture
● Getting insights faster

45. By the way
Every WSO2 product:
• Has APIs to manage the product
– Every function has an API
• Creates events and streams
– Monitoring and callbacks

47. WSO2 Update Manager
Built on APIs, leading to Adaptive Business
https://cdn.updates.wso2.com
https://api.updates.wso2.com
WUM Sync
PMT
WUM Client
APIM Cloud APP
Cloud
Product Dist
C P
U W
CDN

48. • Governed and observable
• Scalable in real time
• Cloud enabled
• Open Source
WSO2 is the only company that gives you APIs,
Streams and Events for your entire IT assets

49. Focus areas for WSO2
• Creating the right environment and model for Serverless and
Cloud Native
– Coupling costs to outcomes
● Enhancing the recursive nature of the technology
– Improving generational adaptation
● Building a better programming model for working with APIs,
Events and Streams
– Ballerina, Siddhi, Push/Pull mediation
– The right programming model for the right task
● Improving our Governance by surveillance
– Managing complexity

50. Sessions and Tracks
• Integration Track and API Track
– Creating an API First architecture
• Analytics Track
– Handling Events and Streams
• Ballerina Track
– Recursive, Cloud Native programming and integration
• IAM Track
– Identities as APIs, Events and Streams

51. Call to action
• Does your development model embrace adaptation:
–Iteration, observability and fast selection
• Do you have a plan to convert your IT assets into
–APIs, Events and Streams?
• Do you have a recursive architecture?
• How do your systems adapt to real-time data?
If you are doing these things, come and tell me your stories

52. Adapt or Die!?
•Biological adaptation is driving our businesses and
software
•The right architecture allows us to adapt faster
–APIs, Events and Streams allow us to iterate faster
–Observability and Governance manage complexity
•Creating (and adapting) digital experiences is the key to
becoming an adaptive business
52

54. Software is eating the world
but
Darwin is eating software

55. wso2.com
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