As Administrate moves towards embracing being a Headless Training Platform, we look at Headless and Composable Architecture principles and how they can benefit our customers by creating a more flexible and reliable platform.
Headless Training Operations
Administrate aims to be the core of a Training Organization’s Operations; managing the scheduling, operation and reporting of Learning & Development within an Enterprise. Everyone of our customers has, a unique set of Learners who want a customized Learning Experience, and a unique set of organizational goals that drive their Training needs. We provide the platform on which our Customers can build a Training Operation that delivers a rich Learning Experience while delivering measurable impact to organizational goals through seamless integration with other Enterprise systems.
Administrate’s place in a Learning Ecosystem usually looks like this:
Just as a Headless LMS or CRM enables the replacement of the system’s provided digital experience and replace it with an interface created, customized and maintained by a client, we envisage a Headless Training Operation working in the same way. This will allow our customers to closely control the Learning Experience while leveraging the power of the Administrate Platform.
Due to the huge number of options modern enterprises have in HRIS, CRM, and Service Bus systems, the Administrate platform needs a clear set of interfaces for these systems to communicate over, this is where a Headless Architecture can help.
Headless Architecture
To deliver a secure, flexible and adaptable training platform on which our Customer can build rich learning experiences Administrate has a Headless Architecture which separates backend and frontend services. This enables our customer to build unique digital experiences for their Learners while leveraging all the capabilities of the Administrate backend.
To drive us in this vision we are adopting a set of architecture principles that help inform our Product teams, and aligning a roadmap of further technology improvements with these principles at the forefront.
Composable: API/WebHooks First
- Frontend / Backend separation with our interfaces communicating with powerful descriptive APIs
- Public documentation automatically created from definition of the API
- All business logic should be in backend services so it can be fully capitalized by alternative interfaces
- Internally built capabilities should also be accessible by public APIs
- Adopt GraphQL API to leverage federation graphs into one supergraph
- Adoption of Open Standards where possible to increase interoperability with other systems
Observable: Standardized Instrumentation & Alerting
- OpenTelemetry Tracing deployed for all backend services
- Structured Logging and Metrics for all critical transactions
- Tiered Alerts with internally agreed response times
- Auditable by design to capture the what, who, when of critical actions
Deliverable: Standardized deployment platform
- All backend services to be Containerized for easy orchestration
- CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Delivery) for all internally developed services
- Frontend services to be modular, component driven architectures
Many of these principles we have been following for years, 5 years ago we started shifting to a Headless Architecture, you can see some of the key milestones that we have hit along with way:
These principles are based around Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless (MACH) and Composable Architecture principles.
MACH Principles:
- Microservices: individual capabilities that are independently developed and deployed
- API-first: all platform functionality accessible through the API
- Cloud-native: employing SaaS (Software as a service) to host the platform
- Headless: Frontend decoupled from the backend, providing freedom of design for creating user interfaces for multiple channels
Benefits
Customizable Customer Experience (CX)
- With separation of presentation layer. Our customers can focus on their Learners Digital Experience without having to worry about the heavy lifting of the backend components.
- Learner Experiences can be multi-channel with both customizable Web and Mobile experiences building on the same set of APIs.
Easy to Integrate
- Increased interoperability due to descriptive APIs and adopting open standards makes it much easier to integrate with further systems.
- Flexible to quickly adapt and iterate
- Quicker time to market for our customers. L&D operations can quickly develop prototypes building on the core concepts in our platform.
Highly Scalable and Reliable
- Platform can easily scale individual components depending on changing customer load.
- More reliable; as the failures and vulnerabilities of one component are less likely to affect the rest of the system.
Future-proof
- Easier to upgrade and replace out-of-date components, due to modular nature of the platform.
Conclusion
As well as the customer facing changes outlined above we have also been investing in the architecture of our internal platform and the processes that new engineering projects must go through. In the last year alone we have:
- Standardized our CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions. Resulting in us deploying changes more quickly and safely than ever before.
- Rolled out a new Software Architecture Design process that all new projects must adhere to. Encouraging more discussion around key safety, scalability and quality decisions.
- Invested in reducing our technical debt by deleting dead code and deprecating underused features, helping us focus on more important areas where we can deliver more value to our customers.
This investment is set to continue with key projects aiming to improvement composability, observability and deliverability of our platform. These will likely include:
- Decomposing some of our larger monolithic APIs, looking towards Event Driven systems and Federation techniques.
- Introducing more OpenTelemetry to trace and view requests through distributed systems
- Consolidating our delivery pipelines by containerizing our final services, introducing more quality checks and overhauling our feature toggling system.
Due to the investments over the last 5 years, Administrate’s Platform has never been more capable and flexible for delivering Customer needs. The adoption of these Headless Architecture principles will further consolidate this vision, ensuring we are all aligned in delivering further improvements in the coming months and years.