With tens of thousands of insurance agencies and almost a million insurance professionals, the insurance software industry serves a complex marketplace. Software solutions for this rapidly changing industry require constant updating. When those expectations combine with rapid technological advances in fields like policy management systems, it becomes clear that software engineers require progressive development strategies, data storage, and portals.
Industries that manage similar complex financial transactions, recommendation algorithms, and never-ending software upgrades — like PayPal and Spotify — have transitioned to a new software development methodology called containerization. It is considered the most efficient method of developing and deploying software that exists to date.
If you’ve transitioned to an agile development model, but you do not see the scalability and portability anticipated, you need to evolve your business processes to support a different model. Containerization delivers maximum development and test efficiency, and minimizes rollback issues.
Agile Development Won’t Solve All of Your Problems
It’s not easy to change the entire methodology of your development and test teams. But if you continue to rely on the engineers who say, “We’ve done it this way for 20 years, and it’s always worked just fine”, then you’re going to be left behind — like Blockbuster was when the industry shifted to Netflix. You can either desperately chase an agile model while using what has worked in the past, or you can arm your team with the latest thinking and strategies.
As software methodology evolves into a continuous development cycle, containerization methods make it easier to pass completed modules, keeping the development cycle flowing and responsive to change.
Containerized Development Is a New Methodology
It’s a development platform and methodology based on packaging everything that an application needs to run, including libraries and dependencies, into a single container. Containers are self-describing and portable, allowing a packaged application to run identically on every system. The method makes collaboration simpler, and boosts the reliability of automated test tool results.
Principal engineers may envision scalability and portability on every project while working in an agile development environment, but the development process needs to evolve to support the disruption of a never-ending cycle. As more companies move to this unique development platform and methodology, prepare your employees to stay afloat in an agile development environment.
Docker Leads the Containerization Movement
The most popular implementation of the containerization principle is Docker. But Docker isn’t just a development platform — it is a methodology and a whole new approach to the development cycle. Uber, Expedia, and GE Appliances now rely on Docker’s containerization model for enterprise development. Adoption stats show that it is quickly becoming an industry standard due to the enhanced scalability and portability it offers.
Docker works locally and is also supported by all of the major cloud providers, including Amazon’s AWS and Google’s GCP, contributing to its suitability for a global workforce.
Keep Your Best Employees by Providing Professional Development
Companies need to stay on the leading edge to keep up in the competitive marketplace. It’s no easy feat to re-engineer your development process, but individual and team learning strategies, like Docker training, are powerful and crucial accelerators of change.
As the concepts of agile development, AI, and machine learning become part of your daily workload, invest in your employees’ skill set to further their ability to implement complex solutions. After all, keeping your architects and engineers on the leading edge of software development is critical to employee satisfaction and retention.
