How the ‘Pod’ became suddenly high tech and a CTRM game changer.

With a focus on cocoa, the word ‘pod’ resonates at Agiboo to the fruit with the rough leathery rind containing the cocoa beans which many of our clients trade. They come in many colors, depending on the ripeness and probably you have seen a few on the Agiboo website. Not everybody seems to be aware that cocoa beans grow in pods though. Apparently nature found something smart to have these conveniently encapsulated.

New generation of software architecture

The word pod has been one the latest buzzwords in the technology shift we are making with Agiblocks CTRM as yet again we are moving to a complete new generation of software architecture, allowing many new possibilities. It is tempting to go into a nerdy tech explanation of this new architecture, but putting things into perspective: We have seen in the 1990’s and early 2000 the use of client server architecture. In fact many companies still use this architecture as CTRM platform. It had all these difficulties of installing it on each PC, not be able to run on tablet or phone and each change required a new or extra install. As Agiboo started in 2009 we started with complete web based solution, in the cloud on a SaaS model. A big improvement but not automatically scalable, portable and still somewhat monolithic from certain perspectives

The benefits for the user of CTRM

As humankind is evolving in constant better technology, this is addressed by an architecture called microservices. This goes hand in hand with a concept called containerization.  The benefits are plenty, mostly from a technical point of view, like deploy once and run anywhere or efficient use of resources. For the user of a CTRM system it translates to quicker deployments, faster development, not having to wait for an upgrade, faster development, tighter security, more stability and a pick-and-choose concept of functionality.

Agiboo is embracing this architecture and already partially released this technology to its customers. Since this month all our cloud deliveries are serviced through Microsoft Azure and mechanisms such as containers and Kubernetes are being deployed. Talking about Kubernetes, originally designed by Google, is a container-orchestration system for automating computer application deployment, scaling and management. 

Always learn from nature

Here we find the pod again, as Kubernetes is using pods. Not to encapsulate cocoa beans but for containerized components. The basic scheduling unit in Kubernetes is a pod. In that sense, we could always learn from nature. Embracing this architecture means that our clients can rely on being future-proof and will benefit from everything that new technologies have to offer.

If you’d like to learn more about the Agiblocks CTRM architecture and features or like to have a demonstration, feel free to contact us.