Trinity of Cloud Workloads

On-prem, the foundational infrastructure used to be network, storage, and compute. People draw layers and diagrams to show how cloud providers now take care of these, and how your concern changes and simplifies as you move from IaaS to PaaS to SaaS. In reality, we are not adding new layers, or making it too much simpler; the same layers have taken new forms. We always have some compute to do, some data to store, and the need to restrict access. It’s probably gotten more complex too. So the need for people who understand these foundational elements ain’t going away. It’s naive to imagine a world where you will not be forced to think in terms of these fundamental terms.

Take for example IaaS - do you really want to control the VM, the disk, and the network? Paradigms change, but the foundation stays. The new abstractions that you now have to consider instead are apps, data, and access control. You still need to worry about data management, backups, and access controls.

Some people think that the network is dead. However, it just took a different form in the name of a virtualized application fabric and the access control around it. Access and the control thereof is still an infrastructure piece that you own rather than assuming it magically gets taken care of as long as you focus on just the compute piece (apps). Having a common infrastructure paradigm, common management helps. If every app had to discover it for themselves it would create a lot of variances and governance nightmares. In the cloud world, this is called IAM.

However, IAM is not quite the application fabric and access control that the cloud world needed. It is a restricted view that merely controls access to cloud resources via secrets (aka service accounts). It’s time to get some true app Fabric and app IAM in place that is comprehensive, abstracted better, and that truly helps manage access control in this new virtual world.

Give Araali Networks a spin. Self-configuring access controls for the modern world. App IAM with batteries included. The (shared) responsibility is squarely ours (as solution providers)!

Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash