platform as a service

THE SILVESTRI GROUP

PaaS OVERVIEW FOR ERP

Essentials for Project Management and Developer Capabilities

Thomas Silvestri

3/3/2016

THE SILVESTRI GROUP | Thomas Silvestri, Managing Partner | 3600 N Lake Shore Drive #2608, Chicago, IL. 60613 | [email protected] | www.thomassilvestri.com

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Essentials for Project Management and Developer Capabilities

Summary PaaS is a new category of cloud computing services that provides a platform allowing customers to develop, run, and manage applications without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure. PaaS can be delivered in two ways:

as a public cloud service from a provider, where the consumer controls software deployment and configuration settings, and the provider provides the networks, servers, storage and other services to host the consumer's application; or

as software installed in private data centers or public infrastructure as a service and managed by internal IT departments

PaaS has been built by developers, for developers. Focusing on developer experience and a flat learning curve is critical for wide adoption in the enterprise ERP systems for higher rates of return on investment while reducing non-core applications and systems. There are several essential capabilities that will gain project managers and developer’s interest and adoption. Here is a short list of value benefits PAAS ERP implementation benefits are: Consolidated technology stack to support multiple languages and frameworks Developers can benefit from self-service provisioning of runtime resources covering a wide choice of standard and familiar languages and frameworks supported in a single platform. An extensible architecture that provides consistency and a common platform for deployment across applications and also environments (e.g. dev, test, prod, etc.) reduces the complexity, provisioning delays and costs caused by environmental and configuration differences. Built-in and natively managed marketplace of services Developers get instant access to a marketplace of popular new application, data and mobile services including connectivity to existing enterprise data installations for their applications, testing and hands-on experience. Apps can bind to these services automatically reducing cycle time by eliminating the typical complexities around deployment, security, networking and resource management. Development teams of


any size should be able to start right away with the technology stack that is best suited for their apps and rapidly evolve new ideas into complex applications, increasing business agility. Enhanced dashboards for app owners Developers can manage and administer their applications and associated services from a consolidated dashboard to view real time application status, event activity streams, resource usage and logs. This empowers application owners and encourages a self-service model freeing up IT operations teams to focus on more value added activities. Operational Agility Essential for Enterprise PaaS A good private PaaS model must also have downstream benefits to the operational team with additional features that support not just the quick development of a new generation of data-aware applications, but also the deployment operations of the apps and platform. Built-in capabilities that contain the high costs of downtime, enforce enterprise policy and prevent disruptions to the application lifecycle will go a long way to improve operational speed and consistency. A true Enterprise PaaS provides an integrated suite of operational capabilities: Enact enterprise policy controls and governance The platform provides a clean separation of Developer and Operator functions that segregate access of shared resources and apply organization wide governance models, making it easier for operations teams to enact tight access and policy controls, including mapping to user authentication and identity systems in the enterprise. Scale to meet peak user demands while reducing hardware costs Adding more application and platform resources has traditionally been accomplished by vertical scaling, i.e. adding larger machines and more compute. This is slow, necessitates downtime and adds expensive hardware investments. Today, cloud application architectures can employ horizontal scaling, which can be accomplished with an enterprise PaaS using faster and lightweight methods like adding more containers. A platform that is purpose built for enterprise applications should be able to rapidly scale to hundreds of application instances in under a minute. Built in mechanisms will dynamically route and automatically load balance application requests across the newly scaled instances to ensure optimal end user service. Designed for high application availability (HA) Most platforms delegate complete responsibility of ensuring application availability to the underlying IaaS. Given the high costs of downtime and the wide variability in the


support for these services in the IaaS, an enterprise PaaS needs to supplement with capabilities that improve uptime and recovery such as, failure detection, app owner alerts and auto recovery or healing of application instances and platform processes. Application monitoring and metrics Many organizations deploy Application Performance Management (APM) tools only after they encounter problems. A PaaS that facilitates the collection of application and infrastructure information and integrates with existing monitoring and alerting infrastructure can help Operators proactively improve app performance, customer experience and mitigate the expensive costs of downtime. Flexibility to run your app on any infrastructure cloud Developers put great effort into creating an application architecture that remains flexible across operating systems and minimizes hard dependencies. For operations teams, there is a similar challenge to make platform choices that remain flexible across infrastructure clouds while minimizing dependency on a specific cloud. For example, business expansion into new geos, merger and acquisition activity, changes in pricing or compliance needs may surface the need for existing applications to move and run on new clouds. Therefore, investing in a platform that offers cross-cloud portability of not just the applications, but also the entire platform and related services will prove to be a strategic investment. Built for modern design and development practices Given the strategic advantages and urgency for building apps, the benefits of practices such as Agile and Continuous Delivery have propelled their adoption beyond the walls of Internet giants like Facebook, Google and Amazon to mainstream IT. With Continuous Delivery, application owners tighten quality and customer feedback cycles by frequently releasing incremental changes to their production apps, sometimes several times a day and eschew long build, test and deployment stages. Business agility comes from being able to release committed code to customers at any point. To be successful, this significant cultural and programmatic shift needs to be reinforced with a platform that supports Continuous Delivery to ease the transition for development and operations teams. The following built in capabilities help ensure a smooth experience for end users as well as operators. Minimize variability by deploying the same application “bundle” from dev through

production with clean abstractions allowing for stage-specific configurations Blue-green deployment patterns with zero downtime

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