As lonely as a (complex) cloud (code script)
We appear to be learning, on a daily basis, that you don’t just ‘throw applications over the wall’ to into deployment, into the hands of operations.
Yes, we’d had the DevOps ‘revolution’ (spoiler alert: application framework structures have been struggling to provide lifecycle controls of this kind of at least a couple of decades) and all the malarkey that has followed it… so what happened to the science and specialism of application delivery next?
Load balancers and Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) have done an admirable job of serving the previously more on-premises (admittedly more monolithic) age of pre-cloud computing application delivery.
Running blind
Avi Networks insists that legacy ADC appliances are “running blind” because this technology fails to track mobile users logging in from a variety of devices across different networks using applications that themselves are essentially distributed across different cloud resource datacenters.
This reality (if we accept the Avi Netwoks line of reasoning) means that the application is poor at scaling to user demand or application scale.
Avi proposes a distributed microservices based architecture and a centralised policy-based controller to balance application traffic from multiple locations – but with the customer still able to view and manage the total workload as one single entity.
The firm’s application delivery platform has this month launched new features to automate the deployment and scaling of applications in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
No complex logic
Enhancements to Avi’s integration with its chosen datacentre management platforms (which in this case are Ansible and Terraform) paired with Avi’s machine learning capabilities is supposed to let IT teams provision infrastructure resources and application services without the need to code complex logic.
“Automating application deployment and provisioning is essential for enterprises today. However, organisations need to code and maintain complex scripts to deploy applications in each respective environment, and for each potential scenario. The move towards hybrid and multi-cloud only makes this experience more painful,” said Gaurav Rastogi, automation and analytics architect at Avi Networks. “We’ve eliminated that hassle. You don’t have to think about inputs or code anymore. Simply declare the desired outcome and let Avi’s intent-based system do the rest.”
As demand increases for an application, Avi can automatically spin up additional servers, cloud infrastructure, network resources, and application services for the application.
This is — although it’s something of a mouthful — elastic application networking services delivered through a single infrastructure-agnostic platform to provide multi-cloud automation orchestration with zero code.
From here, one wonders if (complex) cloud (code scripts) will wander lonely.
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