As technology progresses, so do the needs of businesses. Companies and technology are both catching up to meet the needs of today’s enterprises, and this creates new opportunities. There is a perpetual reinvention of traditional businesses as tectonic shifts occur. We need to look at the current needs of a company for a modern application platform, and how that would appear in the current context.

Google has accumulated over a decade of open-source knowledge to meet the needs of a contemporary application platform for enterprises through our products and solutions. Anthony’s life was changed forever because of that encounter. Enterprise transformation is also addressed by Google, which focuses on the wider demands of modernizing people, processes, and apps.

Kubernetes

For a modern application platform, containerization and Kubernetes are the two major technologies. Speed of development, deployment, scaling up/down, and portability can be gained by running programs in containers rather than traditional software. Kubernetes has emerged as the most popular technology for orchestrating containerized workloads over the past decade. A decade ago, Google was employing the same technology that inspired Kubernetes, an open-source initiative established by Google, which has now become the industry standard.

Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Systems

Applications are typically installed in the data centers of large corporations. As a result, all computing, storage, and networking requirements have been restricted to the confines of their data centers. Cloud usage by businesses has been a major shift in the recent decade. The borders of the enterprise data center have been redrawn to include cloud providers thanks to VPCs and extended networks. Investing in enterprise data centers that are linked to at least one cloud service provider is becoming standard practice for hybrid enterprise infrastructures. To suit the global business needs of companies, these cloud services are typically distributed across regions and geographical boundaries. In addition, organizations are increasingly expected to have a multi-cloud strategy in place. This hybrid, multi-cloud, and multi-regional infrastructure requirements are mostly met by modern application platforms. It’s not uncommon to have numerous Kubernetes clusters spanning across multiple settings. Our current application platform is now a multi-cluster, multi-datacentre, cross-geographical hybrid platform.

Management of Multiple Clusters

There will be an unavoidable increase in the number of Kubernetes clusters as more apps are deployed on this modern platform. Kubernetes clusters are becoming increasingly common, making multi-cluster management an increasingly critical component of cluster administration. Operations teams need a single-pane-of-glass view of many clusters and the ability to manage the installation, state, and upgrades of these clusters from a single location.

Monitoring

Metrics consolidation across clusters, warnings, and notifications for issues are all part of modern application platform operations. With the single pane view, SREs can set up and monitor all their clusters from a single dashboard.

Traceability, Log Consolidation, and Debugging

The current application platform should not necessitate trawling through logs from many Kubernetes clusters for debugging application difficulties. Using a single pane of glass, a modern application platform can view logs from multiple clusters at once. Application owners have a right to expect tools for debugging and tracing requests across clusters.

Managing the lifecycle of a cluster

Candidate Kubernetes clusters benefit from the smooth and automated lifecycle management provided by a contemporary application platform. To avoid any downtime for the workloads, they include updates and patching of the clusters. It’s common for platform software like Kubernetes to provide new and improved features on a regular basis. Enterprise applications may have varying needs when it comes to new technology and stability. Release channels and rollbacks are both standard features of current application platforms.

Security

Authentication and Authorization

LDAP or Microsoft Active Directory have been embraced by enterprises for their IAM needs. Integration with IAMs for authentication and authorization or the importation of security groups is straightforward in modern application platforms. The identity management experience should be consistent across the platform.

Management of Security Policies

Consistently enforcing security measures across multiple clusters is a hard task. Businesses with strict security standards and those operating in regulated industries and those required to follow compliance regulations need this criterion more than others, although it applies to everyone. With a contemporary application platform, security teams may apply policies from a central place, propagating policies across clusters and workloads executing on the cluster, and ensuring that the clusters do not drift out of sync with declared security policies.

Management of Configuration and Auditing

Using GitOps to implement infrastructure as code is becoming more and more frequent. Drift can be prevented and managed better on modern application platforms by managing infrastructure configurations in a Git repository, using this repository as the source of truth, automatically applying settings, and monitoring all cluster settings and deployments to mirror the source of truth. All modifications to any cluster are auditable because they are tracked using the standard Git lifecycle, much like application code.

Services and Applications

A modern application platform can execute both stateful and stateless Kubernetes apps with the features covered so far. It is possible to execute even standard apps in a container on this system. Modern apps and services, on the other hand, necessitate a much more powerful application platform. Increasingly, a modern application platform should be able to meet the demands of its users by providing services that are scattered across the platform. Among these are the following:

Management of the service

Using open-source technologies like Istio service mesh, service management can configure features like dynamic traffic shaping, blue/green deployments, canary deployments, version rollouts, circuit breakers, failover, mutual TLS across services, and many other service-level features. Additional advantages include the ability to track the flow of service requests, identify delays and bottlenecks, and generate service maps based on real usage. A service mesh built within a modern application platform can extend across many clusters and even to workloads operating on virtual machines.

Serverless

If you’re using a cloud service, you’ll have the ability to swiftly increase or decrease the size of your workloads depending on demand. Open-source technologies like Native allow modern application platforms to not only support this paradigm for qualified workloads but also extend the dynamic scaling features to on-premise clusters.

Services Provided by Others

Third-party vendors are critical to the success of many businesses. Runtimes, middleware, databases, and other third-party software may also be included. Third-party services can be simply consumed, run, or integrated with a contemporary application platform in addition to the conventional models for third parties to promote and publish their services, this provides the ability to purchase, track usage, and bill for these services.

Provider Services for the Cloud

To take advantage of the services provided by the many cloud providers, the modern application platform spans numerous clouds. Because of the infrastructure and intelligence required to execute some services, they can only be found on cloud provider platforms. To make use of the greatest services available, current application platforms make it simple to integrate these cloud services.

Balancers of Global Load

It is common for company data centers and networks to be spread out over different areas. A modern application platform must support multi-cluster ingress and global load balancing as applications are deployed across clusters and regions.

Management of the lifecycle of an application

Agile and DevOps developers, testers, and deployers need tools to integrate and consume the platform for producing, deploying, testing, and debugging applications utilizing these methods. Tools like CLIs, IDEs, framework frameworks, and plug-ins for the present workspace are included in a modern application platform to boost developer productivity and shorten the inner loop development cycle time for containerized applications. Open-source CI/CD tools that are compatible with Tektone are integrated into modern application platforms. Defect tracking tools and source control repositories are also included in the platform.

Summary

An enterprise-ready, Kubernetes-based cloud platform that supports a single pane of glass view of the application lifecycle and integrates industry best practices was covered in this first of two blog posts. Section two examines Anthos, Google Cloud’s implementation of the contemporary application platform, as well as the solutions we provide with Anthos.

In the end, any modifications to your IT structure must bring value to customers. How can we help you reorient your IT organization to adopt a product-based strategy for providing business capabilities quickly, efficiently, and securely? That’s what we explain in our “CIO guide to application modernization” guide! Begin your application modernization journey immediately by downloading this comprehensive handbook.