By Dave Duggal, Founder/CEO EnterpriseWeb
January 19, 2018
Originally posted on LinkedIn
In this post, I’m picking up on a blog by renowned Cloud/SOA architect, David Linthicum, on Cloud Portability. David clearly lays out the challenges for Cloud portability and his “shades of gray” comment is an apt characterization.
Stepping back from Cloud Portability the issues relate to Hybrid/Multi-Cloud deployments (VMs or Containers) and more generally the nature of Distributed Computing.
From the business perspective, we want to take advantage of remote services that save-time, add-value and reduce-costs, but the trade-off is that these services are not under our direct control (e.g. how they are designed, where they run, when they change, etc.). The system and its applications aren’t “a” thing, they are a set of things that collaborate to collectively render a higher-level service. These interdependencies across domains make Distributed Computing fundamentally hard.
Knocking down silos and walled gardens offers potentially more efficient marketplaces, but only if transaction and switching costs are kept low. However, a period of innovation, such as we live in, brings both diversity and rapid change, which compound interoperability problems. We need new solutions for next generation of Cloud-native applications that can run across Cloud environments to enable efficient markets.
We can’t eliminate the inherent complexity so the question is how do we abstract Distributed Systems in order to overcome the challenges?
EnterpriseWeb is addressing these challenges for some of the world’s largest organizations enabling Hybrid/Multi-Cloud solutions across diverse and changing environments. No magic wands, just good computer science and engineering. We don’t control these environments, we just make it easier for customers to model and manage them.
We just wrapped up a successful week in Europe at a Telecom industry PlugTest for ETSI, an International Standards Body, demonstrating interop and portability. Using EnterpriseWeb products, one person on-boarded 17 complex applications (Virtual Network Functions) and then composed applications into Services (Network Services), which were able to run on Multiple-Clouds. It was 100% model-driven, no code or manual-integration. EnterpriseWeb coordinates all of the actors in a real-time, event-driven choreography, orchestrating and configuring the elements based on policies with monitoring and automated Lifecycle Management.
To paraphrase William Gibson – the future is here; we just haven’t gotten to everyone yet.
