SUSE crafts next-gen development facilities in its Cloud Application Platform

22 July 2019 | 4471 Shares

There have been several new technologies to emerge in the last five years which have changed the face of development and IT operations: hyperconvergence, containerization, and public cloud platforms that offer infrastructure, applications and services, plus near-infinite scalability— as long as your pockets are deep enough. To one degree or another, many of those new technologies and platforms rely on the abstraction of services, that is, removing underlying complexities by presenting features or services as a fait accompli, with a few clicks for a deployment of sometimes highly-sophisticated software.

One such is open-source Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service, an application platform that’s a straightforward matter for developers to use: just push code to Cloud Foundry for automated application deployment and management through its lifecycle.

Cloud Foundry supports Applications for cloud deployment that can be written in just about any language, and in most frameworks.: That gives enterprise developers the ability to use the best language for each job, and their existing staff’s skillsets and resources to produce applications, updates and new products, all by using familiar tools in which they are already fluent.

At deployment time, Cloud Foundry configures the deployment environment, provides the required code dependencies and binds applications to needed services, all without user intervention. The platform monitors applications, and restarts failed instances automatically. Therefore, staff spend less time fixing issues and chasing red-flag alerts to keep mission-critical applications running by hand.

It’s easy to manage deployments across multiple environments with Cloud Foundry, from dev through test, to staging and production. Development can take place on one set of resources, testing on another, and production deployment can be switched to a user-facing installation running elsewhere, all very simply.

Using Cloud Foundry dramatically reduces both application development cycle times, and also costs.  In fact, surveyed Cloud Foundry users report* an average reduction in application time-to-market of 10 weeks, and averages cost savings of $100,00 per application development cycle.

But, until recently, the platform itself has been fairly costly to operate stemming from the costs associated with Cloud Foundry’s complicated deployment requirements, with setup & management costs high. Now that is changing.

Open-source giant SUSE has produced a solution that allows IT operations teams to offer the power of Cloud Foundry to developers more easily. SUSE Cloud Application Platform packages Cloud Foundry in lightweight containers, meaning big cuts in required resources: memory use is much more efficient, and the platform is quicker to scale. The benefits amount to much lower running costs, plus faster time to production. But that’s just the beginning.

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Unlike previous Cloud Foundry distributions, SUSE Cloud Application Platform is managed by Kubernetes, which automatically ensures that the platform is properly installed and configured, that it remains available, and is easy to operate and maintain.  Kubernetes is the industry-leading container management solution preferred by agile IT divisions today, meaning that IT departments can leverage the Kubernetes skills they already possess to also manage SUSE Cloud Application Platform.

And, since Kubernetes is widely available from cloud service providers and for on-premises use, SUSE Cloud Application Platform can be deployed to virtually any infrastructure. IT can manage multiple Cloud Foundry environments on different clouds, balancing and optimizing consumption of resources from AWS to Alibaba Cloud, to an OpenStack server, to bare metal infrastructure, depending on requirements and preferences.

By reducing complexity for developers and IT operations, SUSE Cloud Application Platform leads to a much leaner operating model, so the whole IT function becomes more efficient, and can meet better the changing business demands.

In SUSE Cloud Application Platform, Cloud Foundry’s simplified abstractions of underlying complexity combine with Kubernetes’ greater flexibility, and the entirety is based on industry-standard open source tools and code.

“SUSE provides high productivity solutions for cloud-native application delivery,” said Gerald Pfeifer, SUSE VP of Products and Technology Programs. “Our approach is to identify leading open source technologies and bring them together in a way that makes sense for our customers. Today that means bringing the unsurpassed productivity of the Cloud Foundry model together with modern Kubernetes infrastructure in SUSE Cloud Application Platform. This unique combination enables our customers to reduce complexity and become more agile to meet the changing demands of the digital economy.”

Learn more about SUSE’s Cloud Application Platform and how it can streamline your development function. Speak to a representative today.

*Cloud Foundry Foundation Application Runtime User Survey, Oct 2018