Practical Cloud Native Platforms for the Enterprise

There is no doubt that much debate and opinion exists in our industry as to what really is a cloud native app platform! Regardless of what your definition is, it is certain that we simply don't have time to re-write all of the second generation monolithic apps, but yet we must modernize at the same time. With this reality in mind, I begin the discussion of how to build platforms that are both 3rd generation and 2nd generation capable while delivering feasible enterprise application platforms.

As for the cloud native movement, it is important to understand the elements of this rapidly moving phenomenon through our industry, a phenomenon of building platforms, not just business logic software but infrastructure as software. I humbly believe that the drive towards these platform solutions is due to the following fact: approximately half of new applications fail to meet their performance objectives, and almost all of these have 2.x more cloud capacity provisioned than what is actually needed. As developers we live with this fact every day, always chasing performance and feasible scalability, but never actually cementing it into a scientific equation where it is predictable, but rather it has always been trial based, and heavily prone to error. As a result we find ourselves delving with some interesting platforming patterns of this decade, and unfortunately we are lead to believe that such patterns as Microservices, 3rd platforms, cloud native, and 12factor are mainly a change in coding patterns, to the contrary – these patterns reveal a much more deep shift in the way developers view and consume infrastructure. In fact these patterns represent a major change in “deployment” approach, a change in how we deploy and structure code artifacts within applications runtimes, and how those application runtimes can leverage the underlying cloud capacity. These patterns are not code design patterns, but rather platform engineering patterns, with a drive to using APIs/Software to define application platform policies to manage scalability, availability and performance in a predictable manner. In this session I will briefly inspect platform patterns that we built over the last decade, and the ones we are building for the next decade. The main objective of the session will be to layout the definition of Platform Engineering as the software engineering science needed in order to understand how to precisely deploy application components onto application runtimes and how in-turn one should appropriately map the application runtimes onto the infrastructure that it needs. With this knowledge you should be able to more effectively decide when to scale-out (by how many instances), and when to scale-up both manually and dynamically as needed within your software defined platform. Which are key ingredients for knowing how to run 2nd and 3rd gen application platforms at the same time under one platform.