Digital transformation. It’s the latest in a series of buzz phrases intended to describe how enterprises are embarking on top-to-bottom modernization of their IT environments. It’s easy to see why it’s a hot topic. Emerging technologies including cloud, containers, microservices and distributed applications hold the promise of greater flexibility, lower cost and faster release cycles. The benefits to companies that make this journey can be enormous.
Unfortunately, making this journey can take years with today’s manual processes and antiquated tools. Not to mention that most IT budgets are at least 80 percent focused on keeping the lights on. Application modernization projects can be extremely complicated since legacy, monolithic enterprise applications are intrinsically dependent on underlying infrastructure and data stores. Cloning complex application environments, including critical production data, for upgrades or testing often can take days or weeks, slowing down cycles and contributing to lower quality releases. Even new applications are too often designed with infrastructure dependencies, trapping organizations onto specific cloud, server or container vendors. This vendor lock-in reduces choice and leaves IT organizations open to unexpected price hikes down the road.
The truth is that the way we have designed, built, deployed and managed enterprise applications needs to change. Business-critical software is too often built in monolithic blocks that are nearly impossible to move to new infrastructure or storage options without lots of effort and time. The applications are hard to upgrade since updating even one small portion means rebuilding and retesting the entire thing. Managing the various versions of the discrete application modules and the resulting testing permutations can be quite challenging. It’s not unusual to hear from CIOs that they feel trapped in a world where they can only reasonably expect to update critical enterprise applications just twice a year at most.
Business needs to move faster. There’s no reason why release cycles, even for enterprise applications, couldn’t be every few days instead of months. Application quality should actually be better in this world. Continuous delivery models such as DevOps should be an integral part of the process. And security should not be an afterthought; it should be built-in. To accomplish this, the future of enterprise applications must look very different from today.
What are the essential ingredients for modern enterprise application platforms and tools in this new world? Here are a few suggestions.
Complete Portability, Without Code Change
Enterprise applications must be abstracted and separated from any dependency on underlying infrastructure, including sources of data. By abstracting the functions of an application into components that can run anywhere, it’s possible to then move the application to different infrastructure combinations, without changing a single line of code. It’s only through complete portability between cloud environments, container tools and servers that IT organizations will break vendor lock-in and gain the flexibility required to move their applications to vendors that offer the best combination of price, performance, reliability and features.
On-Demand
All enterprise applications should be on-demand, meaning the provisioning of new instances should be hands-free and fully automated. This implies tight integration with orchestration tools that most companies are already using to provision infrastructure. The key difference here is that the provisioning of storage options also needs to be fully automated. This is made possible by the fact that modern applications won’t have any dependencies on the specific data stores they rely on. This on-demand nature is not restricted to technical teams but includes business users that can easily perform user acceptance testing by simply provisioning full-fledged application environments.
Self-Healing
Modern enterprise applications should be self-healing, which means applications not only should have measurable data points to define their health but can then react based on these metrics. They must be able to scale up (or down) based on performance characteristics up to a certain cost threshold, restart on a healthy node in case of infrastructure bottlenecks and cache or deploy closer to the user based on latent use performance.
Composable (DevOps-friendly)
All enterprise applications should consist of a number of building blocks: APIs, web servers with content, databases seeded with data, security policies, the operating system, network configurations, deployment configurations and application binaries. By breaking apart monolithic enterprise applications into smaller components that can then act as independent services, IT organizations gain the flexibility to upgrade and automatically deploy individual components through standard DevOps processes and orchestration tools. The services can run anywhere desired, giving flexibility of choice in infrastructure or sources of data. And developers can use a point-and-click UI to pull pre-defined components together to build larger functions of an application.
Model, Snapshot and Clone
Once an application is separated into its essential components, a catalog can be maintained that makes it easy to create new versions of the application. Developers, test engineers and DevOps teams can then pick and choose whatever combinations of components they need to create or clone complex application environments for testing or deployment. The state of the application environments can be snapshotted, cloned and replicated. This cloning process should be efficient and quick. This dramatically speeds up development and testing processes, which to-date have been largely manual.
Scalable
Scaling application and infrastructure environments automatically, on-demand, and in near real-time is one of the essential capabilities that makes modern infrastructure so valuable. Any solution that is used to develop, test, deploy and manage enterprise applications should offer these same capabilities, giving the ultimate in cost flexibility, performance and scalability. As containers are moving quickly from the lab into production environments, look for a container-based solution that complements this strategy.
Security is Included
Application security should not be tacked on after deployment. This slows down continuous delivery processes like DevOps and creates friction between development/ops and the security team. Instead, security should be considered an essential component of the overall application environment and treated the same as any other component and baked into the application from the start.
Push-Button Upgrades
Upgrading enterprise applications should be made much easier by taking a point-and-click, push-button approach through a modern UI and integration with continuous deployment tools. Once an application is blueprinted into its various components, using a modern UI to choose versions and assemble the final application becomes entirely possible, saving time and reducing manual errors.
Single-Pane-of-Glass Application Management
By taking an end-to-end view of the enterprise application development, testing, deployment and management process, it’s now possible to create a “single pane of glass” console that gives development and deployment teams a powerful way to manage what’s been deployed to various infrastructures in the organization. With this approach, it’s also now possible to collect invaluable utilization and cost metrics which can help an IT organization continuously improve their portfolio.
Enterprise applications of the future are going to look very different from today’s monolithic behemoths. By leveraging new technologies and processes, IT organizations will be able to dramatically speed up their modernization efforts and release cycles, improving competitive position. The inherent cost savings of this approach will be transformational as well, as IT budgets shift toward net-new innovation, not just keeping the lights on. The future looks bright indeed.
About the Author / Rahul Ravulur
Rahul Ravulur is the cofounder and CEO of appOrbit, which was founded in 2014. Most recently, he was the Director of Product Management at VMware managing the Availability suite of products. Before that, Rahul managed the vCenter Server and Client set of products with a special focus on scalability and extensibility to chart the evolution of vCenter to a broad virtualization management platform. Prior to VMware, Rahul held engineering leadership roles at BMC Software and Marimba.
