Elastic Application Platform
Forrester Research defines an Elastic Application Platform as “a platform that automates the elasticity of application transactions, services, and data, delivering high availability and performance using elastic resources.”
It is relatively easy to achieve limited elasticity for simple informational systems and web applications – it requires little more than using a load balancer in front of a varying number of “stateless” application servers.
By contrast, achieving full elasticity for transactional enterprise applications is dramatically more difficult due to their challenging constraints – particularly in the areas of data integrity, concurrency, and contention – which is greatly exacerbated when transactional applications run across wide-area networks. This is where Monterey excels, solving these problems to create an elastic application platform in three parts: elastic workload management, elastic location management, and elastic traffic management.
“The power of cloud economics is elasticity”
Forrester Research
Elastic Workload Management
This deals with re-configuring and re-balancing transactional applications, while they are still running, in order to achieve optimum performance, resource utilization, and cost. For example, if specific parts of an application start to “run hot”, elastic workload management ensures that the application is reconfigured and re-balanced – which may involve moving components of an application to additional resources while they are still running. Monterey’s policy-driven controls will determine when and how elastic workload management needs to be invoked.
Elastic Location Management
Where an application runs across a wide-area network, Elastic Location Management enables the re‑configuring and re-balancing of transactional applications, while they are still running, across multiple locations. For example: individual services can be dynamically located close to demand (e.g. “follow-the-sun” processing); or dynamically located close to the “big data” they need; or dynamically located to where processing is cheapest etc. The best location for a service is likely to change over time, so again the policy-driven controls described above will determine when and how elastic location management needs to be invoked. The same policies will also ensure that any jurisdictional constraints are automatically respected.
Elastic Traffic Management
Monterey uses its overlay network to virtualize an application. The overlay network is a collection of software routing-nodes, and does not require any changes to your physical network. Monterey automatically re-configures and re-balances the overlay network to ensure that the right numbers of routing-nodes are located in the correct locations at all times. Hence traffic flow is optimized, and corrective actions can be taken automatically (via user-defined policies) if bottlenecks or network failures are detected. Read more about this in how monterey works.
The benefits of the Elastic Application Platform include:
- gives applications non-functional agility without coding
- greater reliability and consistent performance at lower cost (e.g. no need to over-provision in anticipation of peak demand)
- drives improved resource utilization
- lower latencies and/or lower costs through better work placement
