CIO OPINION
Monolithic architectures – in which the entire program is developed and deployed as a single application – are quickly becoming a thing of the past . Replacing them are distributed architectures , where applications are composed of microservices , containers and cloud services / APIs that may be hosted in different places but can be orchestrated to run together and to communicate with each other in order to form a functional product or service .
Microservices are one of the key building blocks of distributed architectures . Applications are split into sets of smaller , interconnected services – microservices – that can be deployed independently of one another . Each can be altered or switched out independently of others , cutting the time it takes to build , maintain and upgrade each one ( to improve the overall application they are part of ). suffer competitively – some key challenges and questions remain .
Specifically , these questions include :
• Do technology leaders and their organizations have the tools to support distributed architectures and microservices- and API-driven applications ?
• Do they know how to innovate in that environment while meeting code quality , governance and security threshold standards ?
• Can they do all of this at scale and at pace ?
These are questions for which there are answers , but technology leaders and organizations vary in their capability and maturity in addressing them .
Rise of the service mesh
Meanwhile , polycloud means a single application can be assembled from building blocks hosted in multiple cloud environments . We know that different clouds have different characteristics that make them particularly conducive to certain workloads over others . Polycloud is about being able to plug-and – play all these individually-brilliant ‘ blocks ’ of code as and when you see fit .
While this is acknowledged to be the future of software – a recent survey found 90 % of Australian enterprise technology leaders believe microservicesbased applications are the future , and companies that cannot support distributed applications will
To answer many of these questions , technology leaders are increasingly turning to service meshes .
Service meshes have grown out of the trend towards decomposing monolithic applications into different services and components , where each component or
The future of software is distributed , microservices-driven and polycloud .
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