2021: A Software Odyssey

Software development needs to warp drive from monolithic into containers … keeping in mind that, not to lose control, you need to divide to reign… “This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.”

Applications are central to drive business within any company. Without them, a host of processes critical to operations would quite simply come to a standstill. Organizations need to ensure that these applications constantly evolve to meet new needs, both from in-house requirements and external clients, while permanently guaranteeing their stability and availability.

They must therefore embark on a journey through their application “space” to understand how to modernise this monolithic architecture.

Open the app doors please, HAL

An application is an accumulation of functions. With each passing year, these functions increase, become more varied, causing the application to grow larger and the code to become more complex to maintain and modernise.

To simplify developments and speed up releases, each of these functions can be developed as a containerised microservice interconnected with each other. Changing, adding, or removing a microservice is much easier and quicker than reorganising an entire application.

And containers share the same operating system, giving them the advantage of being much less cumbersome than traditional virtual machines that each need to have their own OS. You can fully recreate the application through microservices or gradually add microservices to an existing application until all functions have been replaced.

My God, it's full of containers!

Aside from the architecture, the other reason for modernising an application is its platform. To increase their agility, companies naturally tend to look to the cloud. The simplicity that it offers in providing and performing services helps ensure that applications always have the right level of resources for the business need. Once your application is cloud native, it can be migrated to one or several cloud services as needed.

The combination of containers and the cloud creates an extremely agile application environment. But be aware of proliferation, as this agility does come with a downside. The ease of deployment sometimes leads to an uncontrolled increase in containers, which can quickly overwhelm IT teams.

But I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.

The most reliable cluster ever made

It is possible to modernise everything while retaining control. The VMware Tanzu on Dell EMC VxRail platform offers a turnkey Kubernetes environment for managing your containers.

Kubernetes is IT’s star open-source orchestration system that manages the execution of containers over a cluster of servers (on-premises, hybrid or multicloud) while keeping the application functioning properly. The administrator defines the desired state of the application and Kubernetes makes this happen using the resources available to it.

As its name suggests, VMware Tanzu on Dell EMC VxRail includes the “vSphere with Tanzu” software suite, which allows you to quickly create Kubernetes clusters on the VxRail hyper-converged infrastructure. This gives the company a modern, pre-approved and unified application foundation specifically designed for cloud native development.

I know everything hasn't been quite right with your applications, but I can assure you now, very confidently, that it's going to be all right again.