App Dev Cloud Stack - Can’t ignore the stack anymore

Application developers can't ignore
their Cloud stack anymore...

This story may seem a bit odd at first glance.

What do you mean by "Can't ignore the stack anymore?"

When your background is application development, you have spent many hours, days and years perfecting your craft. You have not only learned languages and concepts, you have made it a point to learn to make good architectural decisions when pulling together the applications you develop.

Up to now the abstraction layer you focused on was generally in the space of frameworks and not so much on the stack you were working on. Just recently Mark Little, Red Hat JBoss CTO, notes that application developers whom are"...the users of frameworks are excused from knowing too much about what is happening under the covers."

To some extent this has been a legacy standpoint, after all if the stack we use is done right we only need to leverage the frameworks and language features that shield us from the gory details.

Sounds like something you have heard before?

Well it's time that we as application developers broadened our horizons a bit, expanding our understanding of the stack we work on with the introduction of Cloud, Platform As A Service (PaaS) and containers to our toolboxes.

Can't ignore

The ideal world was one in which you worked on your application development, using languages that you either liked or your employer required and leveraged various frameworks that hopefully made your life easier.

This is a thing of the past for enterprise application developers that are heading into the Cloud. This Cloud stack offers an array of tools and features that ease both development, testing and deployments as well as the operations tasks to maintain, manage and monitor.

We will take you on a tour of the various layers and components that make up your underlying Cloud stack, but at a depth that gives an understanding to application developers without delving into the infrastructure components in great detail.

Red Hat Cloud Suite

From the basic hardware ecosystem, to the operating systems that provide you with your containers, to how these containers are can be setup to overcome the challenges faced when we want to scale, to a full service PaaS that supports your efforts and finally we will tie it all together in a suite that gives your enterprise the flexibility to develop, deploy, manage and monitor your containerized microserivce-based applications.

What's next?

It is not too late to take a closer look at the modern Cloud based PaaS stack. You can become a better application developer by gaining a bit of understanding of the stack you are working on in the Cloud. As Mark Little concluded, "...ultimately we need to take the time to investigate the entire solution not just the framework because one really can't succeed without the other."

This is where this series comes in, because as a true enterprise application developer we cannot and must not ignore our Cloud stack anymore.

Stay tuned for the next in the series, Foundations for a stable Cloud.

App Dev Cloud Stack series

Missed a previous article or looking for a specific article in the series?

1. Can’t ignore the stack anymore
2. Foundations for a stable Cloud
3. Beginners guide to containers at scale
4. Why containers at scale matter
5. It’s all about the PaaS baby
6. Open interoperability critical to success
7. Securing containers at scale