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/