Real-Time Policy-Driven Management

At the heart of Monterey is a framework that automatically ensures applications dynamically conform to business policies – including policies relating to scalability, performance, cost, resilience, location, jurisdiction and governance. Hence a level of pervasive automation and compliance is achieved that significantly changes both the quality and economics of application management and real-time optimization.

The policies in question are user-defined and extensible, so are easy to tailor to your precise requirements. Importantly these automated policies apply to running applications, rather than just to the initial deployment of an application. Consequently the policy-driven controls create a platform for continual, real-time optimization and compliance at low cost.

The overall scope of the policies being defined can be shared between the business owner and the operations team, to the benefit of both. For example:

• the business owner can define policies that dictate jurisdictional constraints, application priorities, cost-ceilings, performance requirements etc. – thereby setting the constraints for the running application;
• at the same time the operations team can define policies that determine how best to satisfy those constraints while achieving the greatest efficiencies and lowest costs.

In both cases the policies automate application management far more effectively than could be achieved manually or via conventional automation, thereby improving service quality while reducing running costs.

The user-defined policies analyze and respond to real-time monitoring data being generated by Monterey. (The policy framework can be extended to encompass other components as well). For example, by matching incoming performance data against user-defined thresholds the policy framework identifies where corrective actions are required; the relevant user-defined policies are referenced to determine the appropriate corrective actions; and the framework then initiates those actions.

Policy-driven controls are most effective, and will achieve greatest efficiencies at lowest costs, where they run in conjunction with an Elastic Application Platform. This allows an application to be sufficiently elastic to be reconfigured and re-balanced as determined by the policy framework.