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distributed applications

Briefing Notes: CloudFabrix AppDimensions

Krishnan Subramanian · February 16, 2016 · Leave a Comment

In this briefing note, we will talk about CloudFabrix AppDimensions Platform. CloudFabrix is a new startup that is launching at the CiscoLive conference going on in Berlin. The founders of CloudFabrix are the same group of people who launched Cloupia and sold it to Cisco in 2012 (Disclaimer: I was an advisor to the executive team of Cloupia at the time).

Market Overview

As organizations steer their way through digital transformation embracing the idea of Modern Enterprise, they are using the Microservices architecture for developing modern cloud native applications. Even though Microservices is still at its infancy in terms of enterprise adoption, companies like Amazon and Netflix has shown shown a path for other organizations to follow. Along with other architecture and infrastructure challenges organizations may face in their push towards Microservices, application governance is a critical need.

Any enterprise embracing Microservices without a proper strategy for governance will increase their risk manyfold, resulting in a lower ROI with enterprise modernization. For small organizations with 50 or less Microservices, governance can be easily managed without any need for specialized tools but large organizations are going to be looking at several hundreds (or even thousands) of Microservices and, possibly, with a good mix of legacy applications. It is important for these organizations to use a standardized platform for application governance that could manage both the breadth and depth of their stack. Governance as a Platform is already a talking point among the CIOs and there are a few vendors who are trying to tackle this space.

Cloudfabrix AppDimensions Overview

CloudFabrix is a new entrant in the Governance as a Platform space and are trying to define a new category called GPaaS (Governance Platform as a Service). CloudFabrix AppDimensions is a platform for enterprise modernization where they define the application in terms of multiple governance related dimensions and then use this categorization to implement organization-wide digital governance (see the image below). This platform bridges the traditional and digital world, giving organizations seamless outcomes and insights driven governance, using Blueprints and through service discovery and data driven intelligence.

In the following section, we will do a SWOT analysis on their platform. This analysis is based on the demo they showed during the briefing session.

Strengths:

  • The platform solves a more critical need for any organization embracing digital transformation by bridging the legacy world with modern cloud native applications
  • Ability to enforce governance across the entire application stack
  • Platform is capable of enabling the “social graph” for Microservices
  • Multi – Cloud support

Weakness:

  • Lack of standardization in the industry around Microservices governance puts burden on the startup but it is also an opportunity to establish themselves in a thought leadership position
  • The imperative is on the company to carve out a new space related to governance

Opportunities:

  • At this point, the space is not crowded with very few players.in the space. Once Microservices adoption in the enterprise increase, there will be a stronger demand for such a platform and there is an exit opportunity as larger vendors try to jump into the space
  • Since they are one of the early movers in the space with other competing startups, they have a good opportunity to grab a significant portion of the market pie

Threats:

  • As it is the case with any startup trying to carve a new space, larger vendors will jump in once they see the opportunity. It is a threat as well as an opportunity for CloudFabrix.

Competitors: Apcera, Weaveworks, Sysdig

On Robustness And Resiliency

Krishnan Subramanian · January 24, 2013 · 10 Comments

RisBlog1When you talk about cloud computing with the enterprises and tell them how cloud requires a different approach to designing applications, I get the biggest pushback from them. Since most of the large enterprises are used to the idea that expensive and powerful hardware that seldom fails is the only way to build robustness into their IT (which ensures business continuity), they are appalled by the new way of designing applications for the cloud. They feel that they are being forced to subscribe to a completely new paradigm in order to take advantage of the cloud. In spite of the marketing gimmicks from the traditional vendors, they understand that cloud computing is more about resiliency than robustness and it bothers many of the enterprise IT managers. They really have difficulty changing their mindset from “failure is not an option” to “failure is not a problem”.

I was recently watching one of Clay Shirky’s talks at the Singularity University and he was trying to highlight the example of cell phone towers to explain the difference between robustness and resiliency in the crowdsourced world. He was trying to highlight the difference between the robustness needed for the survival of Encyclopedia Britannica and the resiliency needed in the case of Wikipedia. It got me excited to make another attempt at explain the enterprise community on the need to shift their thinking from robustness to resiliency. In short, I want to argue that this mental shift is not a new paradigm which cloud forces upon the enterprise IT but, instead, it is an old well tested idea for dealing with scale.

The example which I am going to pick is the cell phone tower example Clay Shirky used in his talk. When you look at the construction of cell phone towers, its base is broad and built with the idea of robustness but, after a certain height, the tower is not built for robustness. Instead, it is built for resiliency against heavy winds. It is not just expensive to ensure robustness at such great heights but also practically impossible. Once the construction engineers understood this difficulty, they relied on the idea of resiliency for building tall towers that has become the backbone for mission critical networks. They didn’t give up on the idea of tall towers because they are faced with a mission critical problem. Rather, they figured out a way to make these towers resilient for winds.. It is no brainer to know that construction industry were trained to focus on robustness while building smaller towers/buildings. But when it came to taller towers or building (scale), they figured that it makes sense to focus on resiliency than robustness. In short, it not only helped save tons of money (economics) but also helped to innovate faster (agility) than waiting for technology to improve so that they can achieve robustness at such heights.

The point I am trying to highlight is that it doesn’t make sense to be married to the traditional IT paradigm of robustness. It worked well when it came to legacy applications. However, for applications at scale, it doesn’t make sense to wait for infrastructure at scale that also offers the robustness of the traditional world. I am not saying we can never achieve success building robust infrastructure at scale. I am just arguing that it doesn’t make sense to wait for such an infrastructure when designing applications for resiliency can help any organization innovate faster. I am also not advocating that one should rely on hardware or data centers that fail every other hour. I am only emphasizing on the need to make the mental shift as history has already shown us that one can trust resiliency over robustness for mission critical needs.

Again, I make it a point to emphasize that it is perfectly ok to shop around for service providers who offer some level of robustness through SLAs. Even then, it is important to understand and accept the fact that servers fail and designing the apps for failure is the right approach for building modern applications. Whether we like it or not, legacy applications are on their way out. Globalized nature of the economy, mobile and social are pushing organizations to slowly (eventually) move away from legacy applications to modern applications. It is important for the enterprise IT managers to understand and accept this fact, change the mindset quickly and start embracing “modernity” in their IT. Organizations waiting patiently for robust infrastructure at scale will eventually end up getting disrupted.

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