Define, Build, Deploy: The Essential Enablers of Permission-less Innovation

The "Define, Build, Deploy" epithet has become something of a meme within the Build Community. Making a coffee? "Define, Build, Deploy." Whipping up some scrambled eggs on a Saturday morning? "Define, Build, Deploy." Need to file your taxes? "Define begrudgingly. Build carefully. Deploy prayerfully."

However, the "D-B-D" cycle is not something we take lightly. The framework embeds years of hard-earned experience learning how to enable permission-less innovation at scale. The "Define, Build, Deploy" ethos is core to how we build and how we've designed the Alis Build platform to empower other builders because we've seen it work.

So, what does Define, Build, Deploy mean? It's very simple to understand.

Define

The first step is to write the "innovation contract." Starting with definitions of objects, request-response methods, and architecture forces all the hard work of "what are we actually trying to achieve" upfront. "Problem. Process. Too Slow. Software. Solve. Go," a senior manager will breathlessly exclaim. What's the problem? What are the resource objects we want to use to model this process? Where can we simplify? What are the attributes we care about? How will information and state flow and change?

The magic of the Alis Build Platform is how seamlessly it enables a productive conversation about root problems and how to name things amongst the stakeholders of an innovation process. Grounding innovation in this debate and discussion directly translates into its contract (i.e., API schema) with the outside world. This prevents "wild west” innovation (i.e., anything goes) that causes chaos and instead grounds the innovator in the context of the constituents they are trying to serve.

Build

Actually, know what you are trying to achieve? Great, let's get building. The second biggest overhead to permission-less innovation is the startup costs of starting to write the code. Unless you spend 97% of your day writing software, traditional workflows for environment setup, project initialisation, and finding the right tutorial online, “how do I write a service in Go to parse Excel attachments sent via email" is nausea-inducing. Distributing the innovation process to the periphery of a technical organisation requires a great platform that eliminates all those little frictions that make it so challenging to write a single line of code. Running println ("hello world") shouldn't feel like a herculean achievement. Alis Build Platform makes this easy.

Everyone remembers the joy of writing that first line of code, watching it run, and viewing the displayed output. Wielding the power of creating with numbers, letters, and symbols is addictive. Building with Alis Exchange restores the magic of creating and provides the distraction-free environment a developer needs to engage with real-world problems. Reality check: Will my code play nice with everyone else's code in the organisation? Luckily, that doesn't have to be a concern either, with ready-to-go CI/CD pipelines that give you near-instantaneous feedback.

Deploy

The amazing but all too infuriating characteristic of code (i.e., the beautiful business logic you've just written using all the exquisite definitions you crafted) is that you need to put it somewhere. More precisely, you need it to run somewhere. And you'd really like that somewhere not to be "I manually orchestrate 300 scripts on my local machine."

Because this is 2023, you want this on "The Cloud". But because this is 2023, you probably need other cloud services to support your code, such as a database to store data, a messaging queue or a networking configuration. And because this is 2023, you definitely, definitely don't want to worry about security when you do all of this. Getting all these things done correctly is super intricate. Getting them done correctly so that you're sure that a nefarious actor isn't going to exploit your corporate Google Cloud project to mine Bitcoin can be even more intricate. "Wild West" innovation is why IT administrators have therapists.

The Alis Build Platform takes care of the intricate details of deployment, so you don't have to. With Alis Build, you can deploy your code to the cloud with a few simple clicks, and we take care of the rest. We ensure that your code is deployed in a secure environment that meets all relevant compliance requirements and has access to all the cloud services it needs to function. We also provide you with tools for monitoring and scaling your application so that you can ensure that it is always running smoothly and meeting the needs of your users.

The Define, Build, Deploy framework is powerful for enabling large-scale permission-less innovation. With this process, we have laid a solid foundation for any solution that you can dream of. By following these three simple steps, you can ensure that your innovation process is grounded in a clear understanding of the problem you are trying to solve, that it is built on a solid foundation of code that is easy to write and maintain, and that it is deployed in a secure and scalable environment.