Emerging role of PaaS (Platform as a service) in building cloud-native applications

Challenges & opportunities for cloud-native applications

Current technology landscape for cloud-native apps is evolving and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions are constantly changing to meet the demands such architecture. As customers need flexibility and openness in terms of choosing PaaS solution (without any vendor or technology lock-in), a key need is to provide a neutral view in terms of:

• Which PaaS solution is the right fit for my enterprise (considering unique opportunities and challenges in each enterprise)?
• How does it help in realizing the vision of migrating toward cloud-native apps (with microservices as an architectural style of business services)?

The overarching problem of choosing the right technology solution & partner towards enterprise-level cloud-native apps creates an opportunity for all of us to innovate, build and implement the right-fit solution in a progressive manner.

Capabilities of Platform as a service for cloud-native applications

A reference architecture outlined below denotes the key set of capabilities required for building cloud-native apps and helps in choosing the right platform offering these capabilities:

Key platform as a service (PaaS) solution options

CloudFoundry & Kubernetes are great initiatives towards standardization of PaaS solutions but the consensus towards a standardized approach towards PaaS is still in an early stage.

Considering current market landscape with both serverless and other emerging trends, current PaaS solutions can be visualized as below (there are many variations coming out of options shown here by different vendors):

Conclusion

Cloud-native apps development is an evolving field and considering the novelty of the solution, industry players and standards bodies (such as IEEE) are still firming up standards and best practices. As there is no silver bullet in choosing any solution and enterprise context, governance and required capabilities drive the recommended platform as a service (PaaS) solution in supporting cloud-native applications. 

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NGINX | Big leap towards cloud-native application platform from a high-performance web-server

NGINX has recently (Sep 6-8) organized NGINX Conference 2017 in Portland (OR) and would like to highlight some of the key announcements made by NGINX experts in this blog. There is a paradigm shift by NGINX in recent years of offering a comprehensive application platform for Cloud-native Microservices not just a high-performance web server and the same message has been consistently delivered in this conference.

NGINX CTO (Igor Sysoev) announced their aggressive strategy to move beyond web server and offer a unique application platform for cloud-native microservice application platform with the same level of high performance. Also, it is supported by almost all major cloud vendors in the market today - AWS, Azure, OpenShift, GCP, etc.

As per w3tech figures, NGINX is now #1 web-server for 1 million busiest sites in the world. NGINX has achieved this only 5 years and it is a great achievement for opensource community.

Also, a lightweight technology like NGINX to support challenging demands of Microservices (such as monitoring, high performance, hot deployment, lightweight containers, less/zero maintenance, etc.) has been highlighted and a similar approach will be extended to the new application platform.

The overall application platform has 3 key components:

1. NGINX Controller

• Security using RBAC (load balancing config by app owners, self-control).
• Centralized traffic management (routing, push button LB addition, upstream servers management, SSL keys management).
• Centralized monitoring (application metrics, requests per sec, bandwidth usage, consolidated dashboard).

2. NGINX Unit

• A brand new lightweight open-source application server.
• Unique in the industry to support multiple languages in one application server.
• Current beta version supports Python, PHP & Go. Java & NodeJs support to be available soon.

3. NGINX/NGINX Plus Web Server

• High-performance web server, which is the backbone of the entire application platform.

In conclusion, big aspirations by NGINX as a company to move forward aggressively towards establishing themselves as a cloud-native platform. Keep watching NGINX!!

References:

• NGINX Application Platform - https://www.nginx.com/blog/introducing-nginx-application-platform
• NGINX Unit - https://www.nginx.com/products/nginx-unit/

5 Key Takeaways from Google Cloud Next '17 Keynote Session

Technology helps in diminishing physical boundaries and watching Google Cloud Next 2017 keynote session on my TV through YouTube was a great example to prove this theory.

Cloud has been at the top of CxO's priority list and technology events such as AWS's re:Invent and Microsoft's Build 2016 re-emphasized Cloud's perseverance. Google's Cloud Next 2017 continues the trend and here are key takeaways from Google Cloud Next's Keynote on Day 1:

#1 - G-Suite adoption by key industry players in quick time
Google highlighted the adoption of G-Suite (Gmail, Docs, Drive, Calendar) by business powerhouses such as Colgate-Palmolive and Verizon and very excited to point that with good planning, it can be achieved in the timeframe of 3-6 months. 

"Google challenges old notions and showcases that it is possible to move large-scale infrastructure in months as against multi-year approaches."

A quick Google Search reveals that Colgate & Verizon has migrated 28K users & 150K users respectively in months. Read more by clicking here.

G-Suite Solution

#2 - Cloud is an incredible & cool place where everybody wants to go

Google highlighted their Cloud capabilities with examples such as Customer Planet Labs, which takes picture of Earth every 3 hours and stores in Google Cloud.

With increased security, 99.999% up-time, scalability, faster time-to-market, competitive pricing and flexibility, Google Cloud is a promising future and will be putting itself in elite category very soon.

#3 - Future is Fast Data, Analytics, AI, Deep & Machine Learning

EBay ShopBot, which uses AI, deep learning (beyond machine learning), computer vision and natural language understanding to create a great technical differentiator.

Fei-Fei Li (Chief Scientist at Google Cloud AI) talked about many such experiences (such as the scale of thousands of people having their own self-driving cars, using AI to improve the quality of human life). 

Demo of Cloud Vision API was awesome, which extends capabilities from image to video analysis using video intelligence API. 

#4 - Key industry players put faith in Google Cloud
Google invited their esteemed clients to talk about their experience with Google and their passion was contagious.

• EBay - R.J. Pitman talked about Google Home example (along with live demo) as integration with EBay product catalog to find information about products using voice-commands. 
• HSBC - Darryl W (Global CIO) shared their Cloud & Cloud-scale data analytics (over 100 PB of data with large computing needs to do simulations) and their plan to movement towards GCP.
• Disney - Mike W. (CTO) talked about their Cloud-first approach with 500 projects in Cloud involving Image Recognition, Personalization, etc,
• SAP - Talked about SAP HANA (in-memory product), which is now available on GCP. SAP Cloud Platform (uses Cloud Foundry) chose GCP over other vendors considering scalability support & containerization.
• Verizon - Alan D. (VP) talked about G-Suite usage for the 150K workforce.
• Colgate-Palmolive - Mike C. (CIO) talked about using G-Suite for collaboration & workspace productivity.
• Home Depot - Paul G (SVP) talked about moving from on-premises to Cloud along particularly data analytics environment.

#5 - Better uses of money...Eric Schmidt
And, finally Eric S. pointed out that Google put $30B in infrastructure and we should not try to replicate the same and use the money to better use. In his own words:

"We put thirty billion dollars - and I know because I approved it. So it's real, right, into this platform. Please do not attempt to duplicate it.You have better uses of your money. - Eric S."

To conclude, an exciting time ahead in Cloud marketplace with Google launching differentiating GCP capabilities in competition with Amazon's AWS and Microsoft's Azure. Google's cloud roadmap looks very promising and its brand in terms of scalability, reliability, and availability makes Google Cloud Platform a very compelling option. Personally, I believe Google's offering in Big Data, Machine Learning, and AI-related services seems to be their core competence in a highly competitive Cloud marketplace.