by Angela Guess
A recent article discusses the growing need for elastic application platforms: “Promises that cloud computing can save money and reduce time-to-market by automatically scaling applications (either up or down) oversimplify what it takes to develop application architectures to achieve these benefits of elastic scaling. Few of today’s business applications are designed for elastic scaling, and most of those few involve complex coding unfamiliar to most enterprise developers. A new generation of application platforms for elastic applications is arriving to help remove this barrier to realising cloud’s benefits. Elastic application platforms (EAPs) will reduce the art of elastic architectures to the science of a platform.”
The article goes on, “EAPs provide tools, frameworks, and services that automate many of the more complex aspects of elasticity. These include all the runtime services needed to manage elastic applications, full instrumentation for monitoring workloads and maintaining agreed-upon service levels, cloud provisioning, and, as appropriate, metering and billing systems. EAPs will make it normal for enterprise developers to deliver elastic applications — something that is decidedly not the norm today. Forrester defines an elastic application platform as: ‘An application platform that automates elasticity of application transactions, services, and data, delivering high availability and performance using elastic resources.’ We see organisations moving toward EAPs by extending their current web architectures, following one or more of four paths.”
The four are extending web architectures with elastic caching, adding NoSQL for Big Data applications, adopting EAP distributed computing layers t virtualize applications, and adopting PaaS products that provide EAP concepts. Learn more about each path here.
