Category Archives: PaaS

Reconstructing Woolly Mammoth (in the cloud)

The idea behind the Woolly Mammoth Project lies in re-making genes, building blocks of life, and rebuild a monolith. A similar approach can be adopted in re-hosting an application Monolith by decomposing it into micro-services and reconstructing that application functionality in a manner that is more scalable, efficient and repeatable.

Let’s take a closer look at the ‘story’. You start with a legacy application that has grown out of manageable proportions or is even outdated. Then you identify critical portions that can behave autonomous. Identify cross-cutting services like logging, caching, monitoring which can be re-purposed as individual API-exposed services. And for the core application logic – few considerations can be:

  • Aggregation
  • Data services
  • Orchestration
  • Messaging
  • Integration

Such a ‘Peel & Replace’ approach can now help your organization resurrect The Monolith. While the Woolly Mammoth project may reduce carbon emissions, this new micro-services architecture can

  • Help build product /releases incrementally
  • Build upon existing capabilities by adding new features
  • Enable faster data and quality checks
  • Easily integrate any third-party products

How good is your digital platform? (read PaaS)

If 2015 is predicted as year of PaaS, it may be worthwhile to know why phenomenons like network effects, social interactions, inbound servicing or long tail distribution can alter the way we do business in a digital economy.

By understanding what constitutes your platform business model, one can ascertain how ready it is to serve in a digital economy.

 

One of the key tenets in a platform world is building interactions FIRST. If your business connects producers (i.e. developers, testers etc.) to consumers (Business leaders etc.) in multitude of different ways like access from any device, self-served provisioning etc. then you have natural probability to reduce cycle time between idea and execution. When your cloud platform allows multiple interactions it increases enterprise flexibility, drives structural change and fosters real-time go-to-market products. Decoding the “PaaS” landscape requires enterprises to not just host applications in cloud but rather transform them before hosting.

A non-exhaustive list for PaaS stack could contain-

  • Loosely coupled services (i.e. micro-services) between tiers. Each micro-service can have its own dependencies. This is in contrast to traditional applications which may not be agile.
  • Responsive and reuse of applications or services – having automated deployments enables faster response to market demands and scaling as needed. Load-balancing and sharing promotes reuse of common services across business units improving applications that use these services.
  • Polyglot experience – The more languages, databases and operating systems a PaaS platform supports, easier it becomes for legacy applications to take the leap.