Once just a way for Software-as-as-Service companies to differentiate themselves through branding, Features-as-a-Service has evolved into an approach to application development that drives greater efficiencies and – more importantly – innovation. Shiva Nathan, founder & CEO of Onymos, takes us through the evolution of FaaS and how it can add agility to application development.
In 2016, the term, “Features-as-a-Service,†began popping up throughout the software and application development industry as a new approach that would make it easier for developers and enterprises to bring applications to market. However, at the time, this approach was still fundamentally considered Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) as it was purely differentiated branding by the companies utilizing the term. As a result of this, the approach — and the term — quickly faded from the industry.Â
Now, Features-as-a-Service is making a comeback and gaining traction. After a few years of maturation and evolution, this approach is being adopted by large enterprises looking to be more agile in their application development and address long-time challenges with the application development process.Â
The Perpetual Challenges of Application DevelopmentÂ
With technology advancing at an increasingly rapid pace and consumer demands changing every day, enterprises face a laundry list of obstacles related to innovation. In application development, there are a few significant challenges that perpetually plague organizations:
- Growing technical debt: Bringing applications to market faster is great for enterprises, but it often comes with a price: technical debt. Technical debt is incurred when additional development work is necessary to address stale or workaround code used as a short-term solution. It also typically accrues over time and becomes a major burden for developers, who need to spend precious time on code issues that should be used for innovation.Â
- Ever-present maintenance: Enterprises have a number of different types of operating systems, devices, and cloud infrastructures deployed at any given time. This translates into dealing with countless providers with varying update schedules, programming languages, and potential technical issues. As a result, developers are allocating large blocks of time — up to 20 hours per weekOpens a new window — to address enhancements, bugs, and version incompatibilities, among other things. For example, in June 2021, Meta announcedOpens a new window that it would no longer support the use of embedded browsers for Facebook Login by August of that year due to security concerns. This required development teams to drop any work related to application innovation and quickly address the pending change before it became an issue for their application’s users.Â
- Wasted time and resources: From an enterprise vantage point, the growing technical debt and near-constant maintenance of applications that development teams have to manage are costly, both in terms of resources and innovation. In fact, nearly 80 percent of technology leadersOpens a new window around the world believe the biggest barrier to IT innovation is basic application maintenance and support. These challenges are compounded by the fact that development lead times for applications with minimal issues and technical debt can range from months to a year or more — which stifles the agility needed to address changing technology and market demands.
The industry’s recent realization that many of these challenges could easily be solved using Features-as-a-Service has paved the way for a new, more efficient approach to application development.
See More: DevSecOps: 5 Reasons to Integrate Security Into the Application Development Lifecycle
The New and Improved Features-as-a-Service
The new and much improved Features-as-a-Service is a technological leap that is disrupting the current approach to enterprise software and application development. It does so by providing a more agile and accelerated engineering process, similar to how low-code/no-code, microservices, containerization, and the cloud-provided efficiencies when they were introduced. However, some important distinctions need to be made in terms of how a streamlined development process and increased agility are achieved through Features-as-a-Service.
- It offers the time-to-market benefits of low-code/no-code without the vendor (and functionality) lock-ins. Sophisticated, enterprise-scale apps don’t just need to be able to get the latest innovations — they need to be able to create them themselves. Low-code/no-code simply is not an option when your business logic is complex, unique, and ever-changing or you need complete control of your data.Â
- It provides enterprises with individual, pre-coded features — from chat, to location, to document or information scanning and recognition — that are commonly found in most applications in the market today as a service. This enables development teams to focus on innovation instead of recreating the wheel every time they need to integrate a feature into a new or existing application. For example, nearly every application offered in app stores today has a login and a location finder. It would be a waste of an enterprise’s time and resources for development teams to focus on building these capabilities from scratch.Â
- It ensures that their provider continuously updates off-the-shelf features, removing the need for ongoing maintenance from the list of to-dos for development teams. It also ensures best practices and quality code from that start. With Features-as-a-Service, all updates automatically occur without prompting. One example of this is Apple’s recent announcement for iOS 16. As part of this operating system update, the company revealed that it would be enhancing its privacy, safety, and security with updates like Passkey. This will undoubtedly impact any login processes within applications. By implementing Features-as-a-Service for all basic functionality, enterprises don’t have to worry about continual updates of this type.
The Future of Application DevelopmentÂ
It is no longer enough for enterprises to offer their users an application with the same features as countless others in their industry. In order to stay competitive and move ahead of the competition, enterprises must focus on innovation and providing valuable features and functionality that set them apart. Through the power of today’s Features-as-a-Service, enterprises can put innovation first and empower their developers to be creative.Â
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