Benefits of Centrally Operated Application Development Platforms

Large enterprises support their internal software development departments to improve efficiency, accelerate time-to-market and reduce costs by leveraging centrally managed application development platforms that offer standardized processes, tools, services, and infrastructure for enterprise application development.

Centralizing operations and provisioning of curated tools and services ensure compliance with organizational policies and security requirements. It also allows developers to focus on writing applications rather than be bothered with operational tasks like managing infrastructure and auxiliary services.

Operating a centrally managed platform and related services tailored to the enterprise’s needs provides several advantages over simply giving application developers full access to arbitrary cloud resources of different cloud providers. It allows platform operators in charge to implement, monitor and enforce security and compliance guidelines to take control over the entire platform.

This includes not only the underlying infrastructure and related resources but also cloud services consumed by custom applications developed and deployed on that platform.

Moreover, avoiding single vendor lock-in enables portability and interoperability across different cloud providers and on-premises environments and lower costs over the long term.

Nowadays, most enterprises have adopted Kubernetes as the de facto standard for cloud-native application development as well as the transformation of legacy systems. Due to its ability to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications, it helps to improve efficiency and to reduce operational costs throughout the whole application life-cycle.

Whether Application Developers have to take full control and responsibility for the Kubernetes Clusters and/or the workloads running on these clusters depends on the specific configuration and application delivery capabilities of the particular platform environment.

Application development platforms like Cloud Foundry (on Kubernetes), for example, allow developers to deploy and manage containerized applications and microservices in a simple, standardized, and consistent way, even without the need to care much about the Kubernetes Cluster itself.

Solving the Data Service Challenge

Whether centrally and fully-managed application delivery supported by comprehensive platform solutions or locally managed Kubernetes Clusters owned by development departments, teams, or individuals - one big challenge remains: That is the centralized yet infrastructure-independent life-cycle management of data services. Those are backing services like relational databases, key/value stores, messaging systems, and so on that are required by any modern stateful application. Ideally, such Data Services are offered and operated at the level of the whole platform, too. This frees application developers from operating them on their own in their individual application clusters.

At anynines, we’re specialists in solving this data service challenge. Our data service automation is optimized for operational efficiency. Its built-in reliability and observability features allow Platform Operators to conveniently and securely provide centrally operated Data Services to their Development Teams.

Moreover, it brings the fundamental principle of continuous delivery in software development, “Build once, run anywhere”, to managed Data Services. Unlike other managed cloud offerings of different hyper scalers, anynines Data Service Automation provides a homogeneous user experience across available hyper scalers, regions, and data centers. No matter what cloud strategy - public, private, or hybrid - anynines Data Service Automation is the right fit for building and operating cloud-agnostic application platforms at scale.

For empowering Application Development Platforms like Cloud Foundry with data management capabilities, anynines is offering the VM-based a9s Data Services Bundle, a trusted choice for enterprises around the globe to optimize their operations and accelerate their digital transformation.

The bundle consists of frequently used open source Data Services such as PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, OpenSearch, Prometheus, MongoDB, and others. High operational efficiency, a unified user experience across all different service types, infrastructure independence, high-availability, and backup/restore are just a few of the built-in features of the bundle.

Data Service Automation for Kubernetes

With the container-based a8s Data Services Bundle, anynines introduces a cutting-edge container-based solution that brings the same high level of operational efficiency and convenience to Kubernetes. It enables application developers on Kubernetes to provision, manage and use containerized a8s Data Service Instances from inside their own Kubernetes cluster via Custom Resources, which are reflected in central management Kubernetes clusters. This approach gives platform operators full control over how many and which configurations of Data Services are exposed to development departments.

Our data service automation allows them to perform common operational tasks like enforcing security updates, performing health monitoring, configuring periodic backups, etc., on a vast number of service instances in parallel without any additional overhead.

Additionally, VM-based a9s Data Services are now fully integrated with Kubernetes and can be life-cycle managed on Kubernetes natively via custom resources.

All Data Services Under One License

Moreover, our credits-based license model offers the flexibility to use any type of data service on any infrastructure from any environment under the very same license.

This means that license credits can be spent freely on either VM or container-based Data Services, whether consumed from Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, or any other environment. This can streamline licensing management and reduce costs for organizations with hybrid or multi-cloud environments.

Ready to experience the benefits of central data service automation on Kubernetes? Contact our expert team today to learn more and take the first step toward transforming your operations.