From Infrastructures designed for Applications to Application Driven Infrastructures

In order to explain what I mean by this let’s take a look back in order to look forward.

If we consider the evolution of architectures…

To increase efficiencies and simplify management we started by consolidating multiple workloads onto fewer platforms.

With virtualization we were able to take this further, a new level of cost reduction and utilization and more control passed up to the teams that were building these virtual environments.

This led us to better levels of automation, where the delivery mechanisms became more of an Infrastructure as a Service or Platform as a Service model, thereby giving more control to the Application owners.

Now with the Cloud we are giving nearly ultimate freedom and control to the ‘Cloud native’ Application teams, but with this freedom there comes a need for greater insights and optimisation, a way to ensure that costs don’t simply spiral out of control. 

With the Cloud we are moving from Infrastructures designed for Applications to Application Driven Infrastructures. 

Initially the Infrastructure team were responsible for determining the applications infrastructure requirements and then designing the infrastructure such that it was optimised for these requirements. 

Then came the ability to have a consolidated platform meaning that the infrastructure team could now design based on the requirements around consolidating multiple applications, with powerful Quality of Service enabling this shared platform. 

With automation and increasingly virtualisation we started to give control of the underlying infrastructure resources to the application owners. We created infrastructures that were much more ‘Private Cloud’ like, pools of compute and storage resources with advanced Quality of Service and simple scalability so that the App owners could keep requesting resources and when the pools ran out the infrastructure teams could simply expand them. 

Application Driven Infrastructure enables an Application to be created in the Cloud and the appropriate resources assigned at the time of creation, by calling SPOT we can assign the most appropriate and lowest cost compute resources for the application and constantly optimise this during the life of the application. With our Cloud Volumes we can either bring significant efficiencies, or Volume shaping so that the appropriate storage resources meet the needs of the application as the demands of the workload change, again providing continuous optimisation. Giving you more Cloud at a much lower cost.

You can see here how our own engineering teams were able to reduce our AWS costs by up to 75%, yes the opporunity for cost optimisation in the cloud is really that significant.

Most companies will have a combination of these different deployments though and this is where a data fabric comes into its own. 

The ability to have common data services that span across all the deployment models enables you to be Cloud Integrated, Cloud Connected or even Cloud Native, with consistent protection, security, efficiencies, mobility and compliance reporting where you need it. We enable you to securely get the right data to the right place at the right time.

We’re also providing capabilities that enable you to have Insights across all the deployments so that you can continuously optimise your environment to reduce costs on an ongoing basis, or so that you can identify very quickly exactly what’s gone wrong when something inevitably does. 

I see Application Driven Infrastructure as a logical and extremely powerful extension of a Data Fabric for cloud-based workloads and am looking forward to the numerous ways that we can further integrate SPOT into our Cloud capabilities.