How Utility Services enable you to go to market faster with leaner applications
Tags: developertools, scalability, lean
Published: 2023-07-06 14:25:22

When setting out to build applications, the core goals for developers, team leads and engineering managers are:

1. High performance,
2. Better control and compliance,
3. and Faster go-to-market.  

These can sometimes be competing goals.

The best way to ensure control over the application and compliance for instance, is to build the whole application- with multiple moving parts- in house. Coding from scratch on the other hand, particularly for each essential but not business critical functionality, is both time and resource intensive. 

To save time and resources, developers are increasingly opting for using external libraries, which are easy to integrate and run natively within the application. 

The issue with both the approaches above, is that they end up bloating the application. 

> What is code bloat though? Code bloat is the production of code (source code or machine code) that is  unnecessarily long, slow, or wasteful of resources. In layman’s terms, it means any sort of code that doesn’t need to be there or could be rewritten in a more efficient way. 

In general some consequences of a bloated application include:

* Increased memory needs
* Slower performance
* More bugs

All of these ultimately lead to a poor end user experience.

So how do you deal with code bloat?

A viable solution is external software utility services. 

> Using an external software utility service will mean your application only contains the core business logic, with the rest being handled, managed and maintained by the service providers. This ultimately, results in much leaner applications. 

Let’s explore this further through an example. Without a utility service, if you needed users to select a country while creating their profile, you would have to add the entire list of countries in your application. All this data (the list of countries) would then be part of the backend- and for every user who needs to select the country, the application will have to go through the backend to fetch and display the list of countries.  This would end up making your application slower and less efficient. 

Another example, perhaps even more indicative is having to create the logic for VAT calculation. Such a code, apart from requiring time to build, will also result in a slower application since it will require some computational memory every time the VAT needs to be calculated and returned to the user. 

So what happens instead when you use a software utility service? Take the same example of having to add a list of countries in your application. If developers were to use an external utility service instead of building it, the entire process would be automated, and provide all the functionality needed and more, with a simple API call- keeping the stack as lean and flexible as possible. 

What about control over the data and compliance though? To accomplish different tasks in an application, usually the only solution is to subscribe to multiple vendors offering varied software utilities, with the data spread across various providers. 

ApyHub aims to strike a balance and help developers, team leaders, and engineering managers find a solution. Think:

* Single subscription to an ever-expanding list of software utility services
* All Utilities operated, maintained and monitored by ApyHub, and data managed by a single provider
* Easy and straightforward compliance and monitoring 

This means that developers are able to keep the application lean, keeping as much control as possible by monitoring just a single provider, and worrying a whole lot less about compliance issues in the process!

Photo by [Arnold Francisca](https://unsplash.com/@clark_fransa?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) on Unsplash.