Most large organizations are concerned with increasing the efficiency of current operations, yet many cloud solutions focus exclusively on greenfield projects. Unfortunately, Enterprise PaaS has often fallen into this trap.

Many Enterprise PaaS vendors support only a limited set of new architectures, such as microservices. In contrast, Apprenda believes that application development was not invented in 2015 and that organizations deserve an Enterprise PaaS that supports both existing and new architectures for ongoing and future development needs.

For example, Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability (ACID) is important for all transactional systems and is not going to disappear with new development simply because new NoSQL databases have become popular ways of handling the front end of web properties. Apprenda is the only Enterprise PaaS on the market that supports both new (e.g., microservices and NoSQL) and existing application architectures.

Apprenda’s Enterprise PaaS supports existing applications and application architectures by:

• Endowing Cloud Capabilities Without API: Apprenda’s Enterprise PaaS cloud-enables applications without the need to use an API. There is an API that can be used for some advanced cloud capabilities, but the preference is to build features that apps can take advantage of—such as elasticity—without an API. Apprenda uses bootstrap policies so that applications deployed to the platform will automatically instrument other key functions. For example, the app could automatically use a preferred APM without the need for tooling.
• Integrating With Your Operating System, Virtualization, and Application Server Images: Organizations have large investments in existing operating systems such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows Server. They have long-term roadmaps for Tomcat, JBoss, or WepSphere. That does not go away upon adopting a cloud model. Apprenda supports customers’ images.
• Supporting Existing Data Stores: Most Enterprise PaaS solutions conveniently leave the data tier out of scope or provide a broker to create a database as part of an app deployment. Apprenda supports all databases and has additional capabilities for two market leaders: Oracle and SQL Server. With Oracle and SQL Server, the database is automatically instantiated and linked to a deployed application. It is the PaaS version of Database as a Service.
• Supporting a Wide Array of App Architecture: Developers have used many different application patterns in Java and .NET over the past 15 to 20 years. Architectures also fit the business requirements. Microservices are perfect for decoupled cloud applications that will power new generations of web properties, but they do not handle transactional needs at all.
• Integrating With Your Infrastructure Investments: All Fortune 500 organizations have spent tens of millions of dollars investing in specific identity management, version control, application performance monitoring, databases, networking, public cloud, and other solutions that have helped keep the business going. Apprenda has a growing number of out of the box integrations with these systems.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO SUPPORT EXISTING APPLICATIONS AND APPLICATION ARCHITECTURE?

Existing applications, with a traditional architecture attached to an RMDB such as Oracle or SQL Server, can move to Apprenda and be enhanced by the platform with the following cloud characteristics: