Paul Speciale is Chief Marketing Officer at Appcara, which is a provider of a model-based cloud application platform. He has more than 20 years of experience in assisting cloud, storage and data management technology companies as well as cloud service providers to address rapidly expanding Infrastructure-as-a-Service and big data sectors.

PAUL SPECIALE
Appcara

Numerous IT management tools are available today for use with the cloud, but the rubber meets the road at the level of the application because this is what a user will actually “use.” The need for application management tools is particularly critical when applications go beyond typical single server Web sites into the more complex category of multi-tier enterprise applications. In these applications, multiple Web servers are needed to address a large load of user requests, which in turn depend on the business logic in a tier of application servers – and they, in turn, must access data in a tier of database servers. That’s a lot of inter-dependencies to manage so that users experience consistently fast performance, at agreed-upon SLAs.

To address this complexity, it’s therefore critical to carefully manage and automate the application layer – and while various kinds of solutions are available to help, not all are targeting the same layer on the classic application stack.

Cloud Management

Many companies have now transitioned to using clouds for access to IT resources such as servers and storage. The term “Cloud Management” is nebulous, but typically refers to a distinct set of tasks related to managing the infrastructure level (IaaS) cloud layers, typically comprised of the physical and virtual infrastructure, as well as the cloud orchestration layer – whether inside a corporation or a Service Provider cloud.

This pertains to managing the infrastructure elements on which the cloud is running – including the physical infrastructure elements such as servers, networks and storage, as well as the virtualization layer and the cloud stack. The latter can be open-source software such as OpenStack, CloudStack or commercial products such as Citrix CloudPlatform or VMware Cloud Director (VCD). Managing the cloud stack itself is typically done through the vendor-provided UIs, and augmented by 3rd party tools. The user level elements that are managed within such an IaaS cloud are virtual servers, cloud storage and shared resources such as load balancers and firewalls.

Cloud Application Management

In contrast to Cloud Management, the emerging category of “Cloud Application Management” addresses the next level above the Infrastructure cloud. It is implicitly driven by the enterprise shift of moving more and more application workloads to cloud style deployments. Critical enterprise applications that run businesses will soon make the shift to cloud, including proprietary apps that capture the competitive advantage in sales, marketing and operations for many companies. Too many obstacles have previously inhibited migrating, deploying and managing these applications in cloud environments. The advantages of on-demand usage and billing, fast provisioning and agility can make an IT environment much more productive than before.

The application layer can therefore include but is not limited to

• The application packages and any dependent packages (such as PHP and Java)
• The application directories and configuration files
• Security policies
• Firewall rules
• The metadata describing inter-dependencies between components

The last point is key, since modern Enterprise Apps are typically constructed on multiple servers. This is an important transition to enable Enterprise apps in the cloud – the ability to holistically and simply manage applications consisting of multiple components as a single entity.