Onica’s Tolga Tarhan, SVP, GM AWS Services, was recently featured in Forbes, for his insights regarding the paradigm shift that is emerging in IT infrastructure abstraction, as organizations advance from virtual machines to modern solutions such as Containers and serverless computing.
It’s The End Of Infrastructure-As-A-Service As We Know It: Here’s What Comes Next discusses the obsolescence of virtual machines as a result of the emergence of new technologies such as containers and serverless computing that offer better cost effectiveness, scalability and ease of maintenance. “These two models, not VMs, represent the future of compute.”
Before cloud computing gained popularity, infrastructure abstraction had taken many forms, progressing further away from hardware to reduce infrastructure management responsibilities and shift focus increasingly towards the applications themselves. Virtual Machines advanced abstraction beyond running applications on physical server racks, but Tolga Tarhan posits that they no longer are the best solution due to a set of limitations, ranging from inefficiencies while running multiple operating systems to limited flexibility across different hyperscalers.
Containers, as per the article, represent the next stage in abstraction, offering much greater scalability, flexibility and resource efficiency than virtual machines. “In fact, on the infrastructure required for one VM, you could run a dozen containers”, says Tarhan. For organizations that have existing applications that they would like to refactor or replatform, containers offer an excellent solution.
On the other hand, when building net new applications, a viable solution can be seen in the form of serverless computing, which offers the latest in abstraction technologies. The article discusses the cost effectiveness offered by serverless computing, where costs are only incurred when requests are processed, so the company never pays for idle time. This makes serverless computing an excellent platform for event-driven applications and workloads that are “triggered by a finite event like a user accessing a web app.”
Transitioning from an on-prem data center or from older environments such as virtual machines must not be seen as a simple lift and shift endeavour. The article provides some tips to keep in mind when carrying out such a transition, advising organizations to implement fundamental changes to IT processes so that they are designed to work optimally with these new technologies. From assessing the viability of each solution for a company’s individual use cases and utilizing a “strangler method” for adoption, to adopting a cloud native mindset, a well strategized approach can minimize the likelihood of any future complications.
To read the full article, visit Forbes here.
Are you interested in adopting containers or serverless computing to power your legacy applications and future-proof your technology? Get in touch with our application modernization team today and learn how Onica can help!
