Insights
8 Operational Considerations for Going Headless
When considering a headless stack, there are several factors to take into account.
- Article
- 4 MIN READ
- Jun 9, 2023
-
Dom SelvonChief Technology Officer
-
Matt GouldChief Commerce Officer
Summary
If you are about to start the move towards headless technologies, there are many variables for you to consider. One of the biggest challenges you’ll need to face is aligning your operational workflow to the shifts you’ll be making in your technology ecosystem.
Whether you’re an established enterprise or an ambitious mid-sized company, here are eight key areas you should take into account:
Containerization
Continuous Integration and Deployment
Seamless Orchestration and Consistent Application Definition
Observability
Service Discovery
Networking and Security
Developer Enablement
Container Registry and Runtime
1. Containerization
Containerization refers to the process of packaging up your software code along with all its necessary components — like libraries, system tools, and other dependencies — so that they are bundled together in one place.
The benefit of doing this is that your software or applications can function within any operating environment or system. This ensures your applications remain operational and compatible as your core technology shifts. Embracing this as a best practice enables you to maintain a stable and scalable suite of services. Containerization is also key for making sure your applications can be easily scanned for vulnerabilities and potential security issues.
Docker is an open-source containerization platform that has established itself as an industry standard for companies adopting this way of working. Their lightweight, secure, and standardized approach to containerization makes it possible for you to achieve a high level of scalability and performance across your digital capabilities.
To truly embrace the headless paradigm, businesses will benefit from taking a containerized approach in their site development.
2. Continuous Integration and Deployment
Being able to rapidly deliver high-performing software is key for any innovative enterprise. Continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) is an approach to software development that makes this possible. It involves embracing a rapid rhythm for building, testing, and deploying new features, integrating all code changes into a single repository for continuous feedback and improvement. This helps teams have a high degree of confidence around new builds, and release on an hourly basis.
Many tools can assist teams in adopting and streamlining this workflow. Jenkins is a popular tool that helps teams build and automate their work. It can act as a delivery hub for any project, enables integrations with other CI/CD tools, and ultimately facilitates a well-defined work pipeline and streamlined operational workflow.
Embracing continuous integration and development will help your developers and engineers release work more frequently, without compromising on quality.
3. Application & Service Orchestration
Running multiple applications that operate under load and communicate well is a tough challenge. As your services become more complex, so does the interoperability of your systems. With one service, there is only one communication pathway and one ‘thing’ to monitor. As you introduce a second service, you double your workload. With a traditional systems approach, a third service would increase the communication pathway and load by three times.
Leaning into application and service orchestration can help with this challenge of scaling your platform and data. Application orchestration refers to the process of integrating two or more applications to better automate their activities, and synchronize data in real time.
Kubernetes orchestration is one approach to doing this that allows you to build and manage containerized applications while automating the process. This helps you ensure services are robust enough to stand up to fluctuations in load and are coordinated enough to perform streamlined debugging and upgrades.
4. Observability
A fundamental requirement for any site or application is your ability to monitor the performance and health of the system.
Observability refers to the state of having tools and workflows in place to proactively monitor and debug your systems. This looks like ensuring every one of your services and apps provides real-time data that is easy to understand, keeping your team informed and ready to solve any issues.
Prometheus and Grafana are both open-source monitoring tools that support this. These tools offer a dimensional data model, flexible query languages, a time series database, and built-in alerts to report on the health of your sites and data. They provide a variety of custom charts to help you analyze every aspect of your systems.
5. Service Discovery
As an enterprise grows in size and complexity, it can become more difficult to understand and manage the variety of microservices required to deliver the necessary functionality.
This is where having an appropriate service discovery approach makes all the difference in the resilience and scalability of your digital properties. Service discovery refers to how applications and microservices locate and communicate with one another across a network.
One way to facilitate this is ensuring you have a service mesh in place — the layer of your infrastructure that enables the communication between microservices. Linkerd is a service mesh tool that helps configure and control load balancing, traffic control, and routing. You can also establish policies for service discovery, observability, and security through the tool, improving the health of your overall system.
6. Networking & Security
Achieving a flexible and secure network requires a thoughtfully designed architecture. Ideally, you want to make it easy for your different services to accurately find and communicate with each other across the network. By automating as much of this as possible, you can free up time for your team to focus their efforts on innovation, rather than maintenance.
One way you can accomplish this is by creating an Open Policy Agent (OPA), and deploying it across your tech stack. An OPA is an open-source policy engine that exists to enforce policy uniformly across the services in your stack. This means that once you’ve made decisions about data, actions, or service communication, you can turn this policy into code and use simple APIs to program the decision-making into your software.
The set of checks and balancing that an OPA provides ensures that all software and hardware are securely created, controlled, and communicate well.
7. Developer Enablement
Every business operates with resource constraints. When it comes to developers working on critical services, the goal should be to enable them to do their best work and be as productive as possible.
By ensuring that your team uses Open API standards to generate a large amount of code needed to create and maintain your site services, you’ll minimize some of the complexities of orchestrating cloud-based tools. You’ll also flatten the learning curve for newer developers who are performing site upgrades or building new features, helping you deploy code and realize the business benefits faster.
8. Container Registry & Runtime
A fundamental challenge for growing sites is ensuring that the images being pushed to production are of high quality, load quickly, and appear cohesive across your site.
One approach you can consider to optimize this task for a headless environment is using a secure container registry, and container runtime. A container registry is a system for storing and deploying images across your site that works by orchestrating a collection of container images, as well as API paths and access routes. A container runtime is a software element that helps you run and optimize containers across your core operating system. Together, this suite of software can help you scan and deploy imagery according to the rules you establish, leading to consistent image quality and performance across your site.
In summary
By adopting these eight elements into your operational workflow, you’ll be setting your team up for success as you transition to a headless environment. This is a process that takes time, so it’s important to be prepared and realistic about the pace of change. Ultimately by charting a course in this direction, your team, tools, and processes will become more efficient, empowered, and poised for unbridled innovation and growth.
Partner with us
Together, we can deliver innovative solutions and drive your digital change journey.
Keep learning
4 Advantages of Composable Commerce for eCommerce Businesses
