Thriving in a Multicloud World Where Application is King

In today’s world, applications mean (among many others) business, entertainment, education, news and, of course… profit.

There are entire new businesses created from applications, and…. there are entire existing businesses surviving through applications.

Did you know that according to Statista there were 197 Billion downloads in 2017 and that number is expected to increase to 352 Billion by 2021? We (as potential consumers) use in average 9 apps every day according to TechCrunch.

With business at stake, apps cannot be slow or become unavailable since they are a click away from deletion.

In terms of availability and performance, there are so many variables that could go wrong like infrastructure, code, databases and many others. It becomes harder and harder each time to keep the business apps running the way they should.

This is where solutions like AppDynamics, a Gartner Magic Quadrant APM leader, and the power of Analytics play a vital role in any organization.

By providing end-to-end visibility from the user (either through a web browser or mobile-device) and all the way to the database (as shown in the video below), AppDynamics can monitor application performance and correlate through Analytics its impact to the business.

Regardless of the hardware or cloud your app may run on, AppDynamics empowers your organization to monitor every business transaction as well as identifying any performance degradation and its root cause even at the container level.

Ok, we have end-to-end business and app visibility, but, how about scalability?

Let’s think your new business app becomes a true blockbuster. Apps may start as small projects (many of them on the Cloud) and all of a sudden, they might need to accommodate millions of users overnight and maybe even move to an on-premise environment. This may mean more infrastructure running the app to fulfill the demand.

In the past, we have relied on automation tools that take a good amount of effort (and resources) to provide workflow-based automation. This approach may be good for some infrastructure automation tasks, but when automating the deployment of services on any cloud and any hardware through “one-click experiences”, this should be easier to do and less expensive, by avoiding per cloud & use-case implementations.

This is where Cisco CloudCenter plays a critical role in multicloud automation.

All we need to do is to specify a template (called Application Profile) once, and then, any user can deploy it (with a single click) on any public or private cloud they may want.

CloudCenter aggregates multicloud resources though its native integration with more than 15 clouds (which may even be container-based like Cisco Container Platform).

Besides automation, things like controlling public cloud costs on a per-user basis, benchmarking the different clouds based on performance and cost or even keeping data locality in compliance with regulations is easier than ever.

If you then start mixing these and other powerful Cisco technologies together, we get a true multicloud solution covering every front.

Just imagine any service provisioned by CloudCenter on any cloud, immediately monitored and secured with AppDynamics and Tetration, by automating sensor installations as part of the Application Profile.

Or what about guaranteeing that the requested service will always run in the best performing server or less congested datastore by asking CWOM before provisioning?

Or even having the capability to micro-segment the new service based on tags or other attributes in the network by integrating to ACI and then efficiently providing and protecting the service using features like HyperFlex Snapshots with Veeam Backup.

In a multicloud world where the app is king, unlock the power of the Cisco Data Center Architecture, it may help you win a battle (or many more)!