Matt Riley, CEO & Co-founder of Swiftype, says this year that "a decade from now, every business will be operating primarily from the cloud". That means that organizations will use a combination of cloud based software products and on premises compute to create a hybrid IT solution environment.

Mainframes and centralized compute power has been replaced by public hyperscale clouds like Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. The idea is the same, but the architecture and structure is different.

During the next years, it is predicted that more than 25% of all applications are accessible via the cloud. Web services are used to encapsulate very specific business functionalities. Developers use web services to outsource specific tasks independent from the device, platform or language. The advantage of using centralized services is that these services can be accessed from any application and platform in the same, standardized way using the same interface.

If specific functionality of a monolithic application needs to be scaled, probably the complete application must be scaled instead of only specific components. Microservices solve this issue by breaking down tasks into multiple components. These services can be deployed, improved and fixed independently. As a result, only components can be redeployed or replaced.

As a software component vendor, we focus on developing APIs, libraries and components. Our focus is always the API first and then the UI. Developers use our libraries to solve a specific need in their applications: Creating documents. Microservices replace the traditional library in this case and are deployed and maintained by third parties. Microservices act somewhat like a UNIX program: It solves a very specific problem by receiving a request, processing it and generating a response.

Using the Web API ReportingCloud, MS Word compatible templates can be merged with JSON data to generate documents in industry standard formats such as DOC, DOCX and Adobe PDF.

The high performance Web API is accessible from any application and platform. And this is just the beginning. ReportingCloud is a reporting platform for all types of tasks. We just rolled out our spell checking technology as endpoints to ReportingCloud to enable cloud-based spell checking in any application.

If you are thinking about converting classic applications to cloud-based applications, our engineers can help with best practices and strategies for a successful migration.