Early business application architecture was simple. Customers directly connected to a database behind the safety of the corporate firewall. Customers didn’t have to worry about exposing their business applications to security threats outside of the office walls. There were very few user interface choices and the load on the system was limited to the employees and customers with on-site access.

Today’s applications exist in a more diverse ecosystem. A modern application architecture is more complex like the one shown here.

Customers want the freedom to connect with any device. User are often authenticated through external identity providers. Authorization is required to access confidential data. Load balancers distribute thousands of client requests routed to large scale servers that connect to the back-end business services using an API-first strategy where the same business logic is available to all client types using a standard call signature. Database management systems have significantly evolved to perform under these new demands through table partitioning and multi-tenancy keeping systems running 24 x 7 with replication, online maintenance, and online backups. In an era of greater than ever compliance requirements, auditing helps to meet those requirements. This content introduces new users to the Progress products and tools that support development in this evolving application architecture.