What We learned At The Colombo Architecture Meetup

Last Tuesday, the 99X Technology 3^rd floor meeting room/auditorium was packed with developers from various companies here in Sri Lanka. The reason for this large gathering was of course, the Colombo Architecture meetup.

The topic of this month’s meetup was Enterprise modernization conducted by Samudra Kanankearachchi. So what did we learn? APIs! We’ve heard about the importance about APIs back at WSO2Con so Samudra gave us a brief reminder on the topic. Take a good, clean look at your API strategy he says and then upgrade it. This is the first step in building a connected business.

Once you have a proper API strategy, release your API into the wild and foster innovation. In other words bring about the Web of Things age. In case you’re wondering: Web of Things refers to everyday objects being fully integrated with the internet and yes, it’s an evolution of Internet of Things.

Speaking of connected businesses, in order to ensure a merger or takeover goes smoothly you’ll need federated identity management system. For those of you who don’t know: a federated identity management system makes it possible to have a common set of policies, and practices in place to manage the identity and trust of users and devices across businesses.

The benefits of such a system are fairly obvious but what are the challenges? Well according to Samudra, one of the biggest challenges would be ensuring the ecosystems of businesses remain roughly the same once the new policies and practices are implemented.

Finally Samudra concluded his presentation telling everyone to make apps that make them feel human and properly consider the environment. Don’t just take it all as mere corporate CSR factors. After all, in this day and age programs are developed not for 10-15 users but for a million users.