How Open Source encourages innovation and boosts company fleet-footedness

The market and users are becoming increasingly demanding and discerning; content-access channels are diversifying; response times are shrinking and changes need to be brought in deftly and swiftly. The new microservice-oriented architectures, cloud environments and continuous deployment techniques enable the new systems, in theory, to fulfil these strict requirements. But in practice? GMV showed how at OpenExpo 2017, Spain’s biggest open-technology event.

Roberto Galán Martín, Software Architect of GMV Secure e-Solutions, showed by means of a practical case how a Docker-based microservice architecture could be automatically deployed.

Docker, an Open Source technology, works by packaging all applications in standardized units called containers, with everything needed to run the software, including system libraries, system tools, runtime and code. This favors flexibility and portability, since the application can now be run equally on physical equipment, public cloud, private cloud, etc. “This tool is light and easy to automate, greatly cutting down deployment- and maintenance-times and winning an 80% resource saving as compared to virtual machines” adds Roberto Galán.

Today’s market throws up needs and challenges that need to be met and dealt with, such as time to market or zero downtime. "These new needs are now being met by emerging techniques such as agile methodologies, microservice architecture, software containers and DevOps" explains Galán Martín.

To wind up his speech, GMV’s software architect told a success story involving a Spanish telecommunications company pooling the abovementioned technologies and deploying them in the AWS cloud. To ensure success and client satisfaction the project worked with a scalable architecture, a full stack team and without any limitations in terms of the technologies to be used. "Production runs are now achieved in less than 5 minutes at any time of day without loss of service" points out Galán Martín. This is, in short, a clear example of how Open Source spurs innovation and company fleet-footedness by driving technological processes.