Optimizing for outcomes that matter requires a shift in perspective. The traditional approach to application design has been driven by reducing surface area and shifting complexity to the environment, but this progress has been cyclical, following the trends of the day. The next significant movement in application development is underway, and it's all about creating powerful, lean applications.

The best app developers are leading the charge, focusing on solving the toughest problems in the most elegant way possible. We believe that less is more – precision coding that delivers unique value, leaving undifferentiated and previously-solved problems to cloud services at our fingertips. This approach enables us to build software that truly adds value, rather than just being a technological exercise.

The Lean App Movement

This blog series will explore the lean app movement in four parts:

Part 1: Lessons from the Past

In this section, we'll examine the trendlines that have made it possible to develop lean apps. We'll highlight the technology shifts that enable us to focus on building software based on customer value, rather than technological ownership.

Part 2: The Elements of a Lean App

In Part 2, we'll define the ideal model of what a software application should look like. This will involve outlining the data model, integrity constraints, state transitions, and connectors that make up a lean app. For an industry that has traditionally defined "software" as "stuff that runs on a machine," it can be challenging to wrap your head around the idea of giving up on that paradigm.

Part 3: Let Infrastructure do the Dirty Work

A fundamental tenet of the Lean App Movement is to stop doing undifferentiated heavy lifting and leave that to cloud infrastructure providers. But for this to be possible, the infrastructure on which our applications depend needs to start doing a whole lot more than it does today.

Part 4: The Lean App Manifesto

In some ways, the lean app movement is a continuation of everything that's come before – open source software, public cloud, and serverless computing. Each of these has helped to "lean out" some aspect of application development, without getting quite all the way there. The lean app movement is driven by a simple idea: Less over more. If a technology, process, approach, or vendor can do something effectively that's not our core business, then let them.

Summing Up

The concept of "leanness" has been around for ages – it's just DRY coding applied at a macroscopic level to every aspect of an application, from data handling to cross-cloud deployment. But as the next major iteration of software development, it will once again transform the industry, shifting ever more work from individual developers and companies onto cloud providers who will create economies of scale through multi-tenanted solutions.

Get Started

It's possible to create lean apps today with Vendia. With our platform, you can move directly to a lean app methodology for new application development or layer a significant new feature or capability on top of an existing application. Get started for free and deploy a sample lean app in less than ten minutes [here](link).

Where wholesale adoption of the idea isn't (yet) possible, developers and companies still benefit from the concept through incremental steps in various areas of application development. Contact us and we'll help you learn how to start applying a lean approach to your development today.

Download the Whitepaper

If you don't want to flip through four separate posts, you can download the full white paper [here](link).