Trillo started, in 2017, as a platform company to make it easy and predictable to build applications. In 2019, we joined Google as its technology and business partner.
We identified one problem with the conventional style of building applications: the non-functional elements of the application take more than 2/3rd time. As a result, the development team can’t focus on the value-added functionality. You can club the non-functional aspects under the umbrella of CI/CD and the development environment. It is prevalent for a development team to waste time struggling with development-environment issues. The microservice design or, in general, the distributed application makes it hard to debug the application.
At the crux of it, the functionality of an application consists of two parts:
- Structural: It includes – data model, storage structures, the design-time definition of roles, domain metadata, external service specification (using Swagger), user interface views definition.
- Behavioral: Actual application logic
The structure of the application can be specified using metadata in a declarative style. Developers can script the behavior of the application. The Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and Serverless Computing achieve both.
If a platform can blend Model Driven Architecture with Serverless Computing, it could serve as the engine of the new applications. If the platform can provide other standard services by integration or its own, it becomes the engine for applications. Such services are:
- Background tasks execution
- Workflow execution, scheduling
- Asynchronous triggers handling
- Schedule execution of tasks and workflows
- Security policies, role-based access control
- User authentication, including integration with enterprise identity systems such as LDAP
- User groups
- Multi-tenancy
Finally, deploy such a platform in a clustering environment such as Kubernetes with database replication; you get a scalable, fault-tolerant enterprise application platform. Last but not least, make it simple for a developer to write applications remotely in a favorite IDE.
We believe serverless and model-driven platforms on scalable cloud services (such as Kubernetes) will power future applications. Trillo Workbench on the Google Cloud is one such platform. It is also called a low-code platform.