The ephemeral composable stack - Couchbase: all board the unified control plane
This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Developer Network written in full by Rahul Pradhan in his role as senior director for product and engineering in the cloud division at Couchbase.
Couchbase is known for its distributed NoSQL cloud database, which aims to deliver unmatched versatility, performance, scalability and financial value
Pradhan writes as follows…
The concept of composable IT was born out of the cloud.
One of the core differentiating factors of the cloud compared to traditional on-premises infrastructure was the notion of composability – building infrastructure and applications from component parts. The cloud is built around the principle of modularity – parts with well-defined interfaces – and composability is the ability to combine those parts in various ways to achieve the desired goals.
This basic architecture of the cloud makes it easy to use, manage and deploy the underlying infrastructure and the services that sit on top of it.
Pandemic accelerators
It’s now well established that the pandemic has forced a collective emphasis on accelerating digital transformation.
Indeed, our research found that 48 percent of software architects are under high or extremely high pressure to deliver digital projects – compared to just 19 percent pre-pandemic. By extension, the global pandemic has accelerated the need for agility and global availability for enterprises to be able to respond to their customers and adapt to changing needs rapidly.
At the same time, data is increasingly generated across billions of different endpoints and enterprises need to be in control of all of it, to sync it across various sites and to make it available closest to their point of consumption.
This means there are certain workloads which for security and compliance reasons may be more applicable on-premises. Most workloads will need to be in the cloud and will benefit from the agility and global distribution of a cloud service while some others will need to reside on an IoT edge or a small retail or branch office. At the same time enterprises want to look at multiple cloud providers and not get locked in with a single-sourced vendor.
Pradhan: Cloud is inherently composable
Multi-cloud & edge
To take advantage of the emerging globally distributed enterprise, companies need to embrace the concept of composability not just for their on-premise infrastructure but also for their multi-cloud and edge deployments.
This evolution of enterprise IT makes composability the key technology for digital transformation. Enterprises are evaluating composability on-premises with a software defined model to achieve a similar level of agility to cloud. Composability eliminates the need to manage the underlying infrastructure via the software defined components and eliminates reconfiguring of physical assets like servers, storage and connectivity based on changes in the workload characteristics.
With composable IT, enterprises can manage their application or services via a single unified control plane that can span multiple clouds, on-premises and to the edge for complete control over management, monitoring and security of those resources.