Optionality Fuels the New Cloud Experience

A modern application architecture offers you more choices for running workloads. But it also requires you to rethink how you deploy them.

Location, location, location.

The classic adage continues to hold sway over real estate today, as land developers seek to reap the rewards that come with highly trafficked plots.

Location has also traditionally been a key consideration for another class of developer: IT staff modernizing applications to run in any computing environment. Application modernization is a critical lever for jettisoning aging code, injecting agility into software development and—if the stars align—transforming the business.

Developers, aware that the right services and support are critical for their success, have traditionally worried a great deal about where applications run. They’ve worried about location.

Yet that mindset is shifting and evolving to optionality—as in the option to run any application in any environment you want, unbound by architectures and other physical or virtual constraints.

The reason? The market has migrated to hybrid and multicloud architectures that afford enterprises the flexibility and scalability associated with public and private clouds along with the predictability, performance and resiliency of on-premises infrastructure.

Rather than view those venues as locations where their software settles down, developers practice workload placement flexibility so that as conditions change applications can be run wherever they best serve the business. This flexibility–developers call it portability—renders the infrastructure location question moot.

Related: Why Workload Placement Is the Key to a Strong IT Foundation

For optionality, cloud native is critical

Seeking optionality, most applications teams have embraced “cloud-native” approaches to building software throughout their DevOps processes. Think of this as the art of building software for a cloud environment to shrink the time from development to deployment.

Modern applications are often bundled in software containers that developers ship between infrastructure from different vendors, offering—you guessed it—optionality. Containers enable applications to be written and rapidly updated and deployed, scaled and patched.

Updates to a mobile order and pay app, for instance, must be lightweight and easy to execute on the fly to ensure the best version is always in the hands of customers.

Managing scores of containers is unwieldy; most organizations adopt orchestration software such as Kubernetes, which automates application deployment, scaling, monitoring, among other tasks.

If any single approach typifies “cloud-native,” it’s Kubernetes, which Forrester Research says propels innovation by putting cloud capabilities directly in the hands of its users—applications teams—helping them quickly build and iterate on new capabilities

For some of you, this may seem like more proof that “software is eating the world,” the most-quoted Marc Andreessen maxim. If you buy into this logic, then you understand that setting the table to deliver this software is critical.

The path forward requires building flexibility into your technology stack that enables you to move workloads wherever and whenever it makes sound business sense. You may want to run an application in an private cloud that has self-service and elastic scale capabilities.

Or perhaps you want to run an application on-premises for the sake of security and cost efficacy. You may also want access to elastic capacity, enabling you to right-size capacity for your workloads as they shrink and grow over time.

You need a consistent cloud experience that includes flexibility and control managed as-a-Service. This environment should support modern applications, with the option to write once, run anywhere in containers, managed by Kubernetes.

This flexibility is critical; the decisions you make now as an IT leader will reverberate around the organization for years to come, marking the difference between technical wizardry and technical debt.

Optionality fuels the cloud experience

To that end, Dell APEX offers infrastructure resources delivered as-a-Service, enabling IT staff to consistently build digital services with cloud-native architectures, while supporting data locality for compliance, security and general governance.

APEX support for cloud-native applications extends to Kubernetes distributions. Combined with VMWare Tanzu, APEX supports Kubernetes, along with existing apps running in virtual machines across private, public and edge locations.

Optimized for on-premises workloads, APEX Containers for Red Hat OpenShift is designed to deliver a cloud experience for developers, offering container orchestration atop Dell software-defined infrastructure. The solution will be available early next year in the U.S.

More broadly, Dell supports Kubernetes through Amazon EKS Anywhere and Google Anthos on PowerFlex and PowerStore, allowing enterprises to run Kubernetes across public or on-premises workloads. SUSE Rancher on VxRail provides multicloud management to allow customers to choose their orchestration platform.

Choice matters. Like their real estate counterparts, software developers require their own modus operandi as they seek to build a cloud experience that transform the business and provide better outcomes.

But unlike real estate developers, software developers don’t lean on location. They embrace optionality, optionality, optionality.

Keep reading: What’s Multicloud by Design and Why Does It Matter?