At a recent family gathering, I found myself explaining the Apprenda Platform as a Service (PaaS) to some curious relatives. My family has a history in the hardware business, and I quickly realized the simplest way to explain this would be in terms they understand – tools.
As I thought about the best analogy to explain Apprenda, I realized PaaS is effectively a workshop where each enterprise builds the tools for all the custom widgets (software) the enterprise requires. This includes the software they use in-house as well as the software they may license or sell to others as a service.
The Apprenda PaaS is fundamentally a malleable system that includes some of the basic elements the industry now calls cloud. As a result, Platform as a Service has become the foundation for many common enterprise use cases. Some of the utility we are seeing repeatedly with the Apprenda PaaS include:
- Scale and deploy – This is your basic cutting blade. It comes stock with all models and enables your developers to focus on business logic while the platform handles the complexity of scaling compute and front end workloads as well as their deployment into the cloud.
- Policy enforcement – This is your set of screwdrivers. There are many policies in the enterprise and sometimes you are just tightening one up while other times you need to add an entirely new policy. The enterprise decides size, scale and scope. Apprenda provides the capability to simplify enforcement.
- Database as a Service – Akin to the organizer drawers, this is also a stock feature. All applications in the cloud have access to the on platform database(s). These enable application developers to keep their data neat and tidy and distinct from other applications and separate between customers as well.
- Continuous integration / Continuous delivery – The hidden tweezer. It’s integrated so well, you might not even realize it’s there. Built in APIs allow external CI/CD tools to perform their current task and target multiple Apprenda clouds in the process.
- Data center consolidation / Legacy app migration – Sometimes you just need to clean up the shop and put all the applications in one place. This can be done with the basic tooling or a more advanced set depending on the applications in the enterprise portfolio.
- Risk management – Every shop should have safety equipment, including good lighting, ventilation, etc. Even if some of the enterprise servers need maintenance or replacement, that doesn’t mean the applications running on them should suffer.
The last few scenarios are, in part, the result of having a well-built software factory. There aren’t many tooling references for these scenarios because they are more similar to what an enterprise does with the widgets built on the factory floor. These are the types of use cases that make companies more agile and future proof.
- SaaS enablement – This provides the ability for enterprises to quickly and simply add feature and plan capabilities to their products with little overhead to their development teams. Ultimately, software as a service (SaaS) applications are a single code base with multiple ways to divide the features into meaningful product plans for a variety of customers. This is not a PaaS feature, but it is a part of the Apprenda platform by default.
- Multi-tenancy – This is the ability to have multiple customers use a single instance of the running software thus reducing the footprint, overhead, and cost of software. Again, this is an Apprenda platform default and not all PaaSes provide this out of the box.
- Greenfield rapid application development – With all this great tooling and a factory, it’s clearly important to get new ideas tested and off to market faster.
What I really find interesting is how easily the fundamental PaaS supports so many important enterprise use cases. This is actually a short list. Once an enterprise understands how to make the tooling work, they consistently find a way to solve problems we haven’t even explored yet. We are seeing those who adopted PaaS for one purpose now take advantage of the systems, infrastructure, and operational efficiencies Apprenda provides to solve and streamline other aspects of their daily workflow.
Apprenda can help you build the right tool right now. Take the Apprenda challenge, find out how we can make your enterprise competitive, agile, and robust in today’s challenging markets.
The post Why PaaS Is the Software Factory of the Modern Enterprise appeared first on Platform as a Service Magazine.
