Cloud Native Development Services

We start by validating your business idea via product market fit. At this stage, it’s important to answer a few simple questions – Who are your users? How can we help them and solve their problem? It involves digging deep into customer’s requirements, scalability needs, and deciding on different platforms to cover i.e. mobile (Android & iOS) desktop etc., as well as industry standard and security compliance requirements.

• Interview.
• Customer feedback.
• Drawing personas.
• Customer journey map.

We take into account functional and non-functional requirements and design optimal cloud application architecture that is capable of supporting MVP and future states and at the same time compliments the client’s unit-economy.

At this stage Symphony performs additional application assessment appropriate for business needs:

• Security.
• Cloud Economics.
• Development and Operations. Routine Automation.
• App Scalability.

Before going into cloud-based software development which entails sufficient investments, we often start with a prototyping phase. Born in the startup culture, it is now adopted by enterprises as well. Since the new application is going to fulfil some logic that wasn’t in use before – some hypothesis can be made. Prototype will help you to test it and thus give the knowledge crucial for the future product with lower risks.   

Three goals are reached at this phase:

• Validate.
  Gain a higher degree of comfort with cloud or emerging technologies and validate technical decisions.
• Demonstrate.
  Quickly demonstrate to stakeholders, investors, and consumers end-to-end functionality and prove value in a cost-effective manner.
• Prepare.
  Create the foundational infrastructure and technical components for an MVP build.

When we reach this stage, we have enough knowledge about the future product: functional and non-functional requirements, as well as knowledge about our engineering capabilities and which business features need to be executed. Having this knowledge, we can estimate in detail the ongoing scope. Based on estimations, dependency evaluations and business criticality – features delivery can be prioritized. And Delivery Roadmap can be built.

• Product Backlog.
  We manage the team and oversee the project, ensuring seamless execution.
• Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Definition.
  User Stories are prioritized, and the MVP is defined.
• Roadmap.
  Phased plan to serve as a cloud roadmap being defined to explain how business value will be realized.
• Delivery Plan.
  Define resource plan, on-/offshore locations, and costs to deliver.

This stage involves building Cloud Infrastructure as defined in architecture design. It is essential for development needs and future application production purposes and follow best practice patterns, such as common shared services for logging, monitoring and security.

In order to speed development cycles, save costs, win valuable time, reduce human mistakes, and provide modern and flexible tools for new business features development and release, we are focusing on Routine Automation and establishing CI/CD/CT process.

• Infrastructure deployment and configuration process automation.
• Development Automation (Continuous Integration).
• Build and release Automation (Continuous Delivery).
• Test Automation Integration into the Release pipelines (Continuous Testing).

Development of the product itself. Using defined at the previous step Agile framework and DevOps practices, to adjust the product for your early adopters and efficiently deliver features keeping business value maximizing in mind.

• Lean/Agile Feature Delivery.
  Design, develop, and test MVP features using a cost-effective delivery model and a lean/agile approach.
• Iterative Experience Design.
  Validate designs throughout the development Lifecycle to ensure engaging user experiences.
• Iterative Infrastructure.
  Continue to optimize infrastructure and maintain Infrastructure as Code.
• Iterative DevOps.
  Maintain CI/CD scripting and automated testing throughout the development lifecycle.

After the first releases to production, the following processes are built in order to ensure application availability, security, scalability and performance according to architecture design:

• Monitoring.
  Advanced monitoring practices allowing to efficiently analyze production ecosystem metrics and know in advance which changes will be required to ensure service level.
• Management.
  Automated modern toolset allowing to apply required changes in configuration, reacting on monitoring data, scale according to business needs, secure application from attacks.
• Support.
  Ensure support team is available to fix and process service requests and incidents according to the SLA.
• Maintenance.
  Perform regular rituals such as testing of backups and disaster recovery works.