Need help with your small business social media? Check out these 10 tactics based on 2019 Inc 500 Social Media Research by UMass Dartmouth.
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For John Padgett, Chief Experience Innovation Officer at Carnival Corporation, transforming customer experiences with technology is nothing new. Before joining Carnival, he was a key player in the technology development and success of Disney’s MyMagic+. Creating frictionless experiences with wearable technology.
“When we decided to create a frictionless guest experience, the discussion was not actually around the technology itself. It was around the value of creating a frictionless experience and what that meant about how to reengineer and rethink the touchpoints,” said Padgett during a podcast with Roger Dooley.
So, when Carnival wanted to create the ultimate vacation experience aboard their ships, they placed their guests at the center of the experience design and improved the convergence among the physical and digital worlds into a seamless experience.
Rethinking the touchpoints and how to incorporate emerging technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), bots, and wearables, meant they needed a headless commerce platform.
For companies like Carnival with multifaceted content and individualistic customer requirements, headless commerce can deliver consistent, personalized, and innovative customer experiences fast.
“Each guest is different and the things that make them happy are different,” said Arnold Donald, president and CEO of Carnival Corporation to CES Tech.
Why Go Headless
The main notion behind the headless commerce concept is to separate the presentation layer which customers interact with from the backend layer with all the business logic and infrastructure and connect the two via a flexible API.
Traditional monolithic commerce solutions force brands to adopt their capabilities across the ship, thus mandating that the business match the solution. As opposed to more flexible offerings with an API-based/headless solution that allows brands to apply best of breed capabilities that match the system to the business needs and in this case the guest expectations.
The benefits: Brands like Carnival, who want to deliver guest-centric experiences are not tied to what their legacy commerce platform allows them to do. They do not have to stick to the rules of a UI logic which are designed to produce a standardized web experience. Instead, they are entirely flexible regarding content delivery, UX and multiple technology touchpoints.
The Regal Princess cruise ship and the Carnival Corporation are able to continue to revolutionize the travel industry with their guest-centric strategy by employing a headless commerce solution. A backend platform solution that enables emerging and upcoming consumption channels to be added in; and a platform their fleet staff can easily interact with converging the digital and physical channels onboard.
Carnival was recently recognized as a CES 2019 Innovation Awards Honoree for OceanMedallion
at CES 2019 in Las Vegas where just two short years prior they first announced the launch of OceanMedallion.
Stay tuned for more on Carnival’s digital transformation/guest-centric experience.
The post Vision to frictionless reality: How Carnival created a smart city on the water appeared first on Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog.
Microservices has been gaining a lot of interest within the commerce industry; and many developers have already started experimenting with them. However, before you adopt microservices for your business you must understand what they are and why they matter.
Senior architect, Matt Bishop lays down the groundwork to help organizations and developers determine if microservices are right for business. In this series he’ll outline what processes and practices are needed to support microservices, in addition to the benefits and difficulties of a microservice architecture.
What are microservices?
This question turned out to be surprisingly hard to answer, mostly because people writing about microservices describe them as implementation details like Docker containers, NoSQL databases, REST and other technologies. Some definitions are great, yet employ somewhat vague language to define them. For instance, Chris Richardson at microservices.io calls them: “highly maintainable”, “loosely coupled”, “independently deployable” and “organized around business capabilities.” Some of these can easily be dug into and worked with, like “loose coupling” and “independent deployment”; however, the other aspects are really hard to measure, such as “maintainability.”
A favorite definition comes from Adrian Cockroft where he defines microservice architecture as:
“Loosely coupled service-oriented architecture with bounded contexts.”
This definition is favored because every part of the statement is understandable and identifiable. You can take a system, measure it against these qualities and determine if they are indeed microservices.
Now let’s break this definition down to discover what it means.
Loosely Coupled
This quality is a mainstay in service-oriented architectures. It means that the components in a system should share as little as possible with each other. System cohesion demands that the components provide coordinated, useful services to fulfil the business’ requirements, yet this quality encourages each component to require as little as possible from each other. The key benefit of loose coupling is replaceability. You can replace a component with another version and not disrupt the system overall.
The most minimal coupling between components is a shared business identifier. Customer name, account number, invoice number, and other human-readable identifiers knit the business together in the physical world. In the same way minimally-coupled microservice components share these same identifiers with each other, but not much else. These components do not rely on each other for data and instead store their own state internally rather than rely on other components to provide seemingly-shareable data.
For instance, you would not find an “address” service that stores addresses for other components. Instead each would store their own relevant addresses locally to avoid coupling across components. The component can choose to modify this address, or store only relevant portions of it (like country) without worrying about impacting any other component. It turns out that bounded contexts often have data that looks and sounds similar to other contexts, but that is usually a coincidence.
Service-Oriented
The least-favorite part of Adrian’s microservices definition, mostly because the concept of “service-oriented” has been applied to so many things over the decades it has lost its true meaning. Anyone approaching this term will likely have a definition that will conflict with “loosely coupled.” This is because “services” are meant to provide data and capabilities to other services so they will not have to manage the capability themselves. In microservices, “service-oriented” covers a few different kinds of orientations.
One orientation for a microservice is proxying a capability in another external system. A shipping microservice can proxy capabilities from external shipping services like UPS for example. The consumer of the shipping service will have a shared identifier (say order number) that is used internally to find the correct service and tracking number for the shipments. The external service is queried for status, which is returned to the caller as data.
A microservice can be oriented to providing a direct business capability. An “order” microservice is one that holds orders for the business. Rather than proxying to an external order system, this microservice stores the data and business rules internally and offers up order management as a standalone service. If this feels like a vague definition, further clarity will come in the Bounded Context part below.
Another orientation is coordinating workflow between services. Proper loose coupling means two services cannot directly know about each other. Like foreign dignitaries at a meeting, they need someone to coordinate their introduction and communication. They do not speak each other’s language and only respond to the coordinator/interpreter. This analogy isn’t quite right, as the two dignitaries do know each other and intend to communicate directly. In microservices, the two services cannot know they are being coordinated. That knowledge rests with the coordinator.
There may be other types of service orientations, but these three are favored as they tie together the business purpose of the architecture and integrate it into the IT topology the system must live within.
Bounded Context
How do you know your microservice is the right size? Is it too small, is it too hot? You can probably recall the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, where she found comfort in the food and furnishings that were “just right”. This sort of intuitive scoping protocol is not recommended for your microservice designs. Bounded contexts are discoverable using proven techniques from Domain-Driven Design.
Martin Fowler has a good overview of bounded contexts and how they are defined by an organization’s human culture. This is similar to Chris Richardson’s “business capabilities” organizing principle.
It’s hard to measure culture, but one-point sticks out. A bounded context’s data model is internally consistent, which means changes to the data in that model must be consistent for all the data in that model. You cannot have contradictions in the bounded context’s data. The standard way of achieving this is to use persistence transactions in a shared database. In microservices an individual service will maintain a transactional database of its context’s state and share data internally.
Microservices should not share a data storage system with another service because information will leak into the services that share the data store, and this data sharing will break the loose coupling needed to maintain independence.
Tune in next week when Matt reviews the benefits and difficulties with microservice architecture.
The post Leveraging microservices for your business, Part 1: Why microservices matter appeared first on Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog.
For John Padgett, Chief Experience Innovation Officer at Carnival Corporation, transforming customer experiences with technology is nothing new. Before joining Carnival, he was a key player in the technology development and success of Disney’s MyMagic+. Creating frictionless experiences with wearable technology.
“When we decided to create a frictionless guest experience, the discussion was not actually around the technology itself. It was around the value of creating a frictionless experience and what that meant about how to reengineer and rethink the touchpoints,” said Padgett during a podcast with Roger Dooley.
So, when Carnival wanted to create the ultimate vacation experience aboard their ships, they placed their guests at the center of the experience design and improved the convergence among the physical and digital worlds into a seamless experience.
Rethinking the touchpoints and how to incorporate emerging technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), bots, and wearables, meant they needed a headless commerce platform.
For companies like Carnival with multifaceted content and individualistic customer requirements, headless commerce can deliver consistent, personalized, and innovative customer experiences fast.
“Each guest is different and the things that make them happy are different,” said Arnold Donald, president and CEO of Carnival Corporation to CES Tech.
Why Go Headless
The main notion behind the headless commerce concept is to separate the presentation layer which customers interact with from the backend layer with all the business logic and infrastructure and connect the two via a flexible API.
Traditional monolithic commerce solutions force brands to adopt their capabilities across the ship, thus mandating that the business match the solution. As opposed to more flexible offerings with an API-based/headless solution that allows brands to apply best of breed capabilities that match the system to the business needs and in this case the guest expectations.
The benefits: Brands like Carnival, who want to deliver guest-centric experiences are not tied to what their legacy commerce platform allows them to do. They do not have to stick to the rules of a UI logic which are designed to produce a standardized web experience. Instead, they are entirely flexible regarding content delivery, UX and multiple technology touchpoints.
The Regal Princess cruise ship and the Carnival Corporation are able to continue to revolutionize the travel industry with their guest-centric strategy by employing a headless commerce solution. A backend platform solution that enables emerging and upcoming consumption channels to be added in; and a platform their fleet staff can easily interact with converging the digital and physical channels onboard.
Carnival was recently recognized as a CES 2019 Innovation Awards Honoree for OceanMedallion at CES 2019 in Las Vegas where just two short years prior they first announced the launch of OceanMedallion.
Stay tuned for more on Carnival’s digital transformation/guest-centric experience.
The post Vision to frictionless reality: How Carnival created a smart city on the water appeared first on Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog.
