In the latest episode of the multi-cloud podcast, Eric Neilsen and David Jasso speak to Tom Hite of VMware Professional Services. The three discuss a new framework for considering data’s role in how teams design and run multi-cloud applications.
Eric Nielsen (@ericnipro) and I (@davidj7494) have just released a new podcast. In this episode, we spoke with Tom Hite of VMware Professional Services on a framework for considering data as a key input into multi-cloud application development. Here are the links to the latest podcast:
The ‘Six Sevens’ framework recognizes upfront what many teams take long to discover — that today’s applications are inherently multi-cloud in nature. More and more, we are seeing the boundaries of applications straddle more than one cloud, whether that means a private cloud and a public cloud; multiple public clouds, or the combination of both.
From my experience, most application development teams start their design by considering the specific business logic they need to achieve specific business objectives. With the rise of cloud-native applications, most are also thinking about how to decompose the application business logic into atomic elements that conform to the 12-factor application rules.
Today, every team makes choices about where they expect to build an application and where it will need to run. Often these choices are heavily influenced by the software stack the team expects to leverage. For instance, a team that has experience building software on AWS may gravitate towards designs that leverage (technologies like) RDS for the DB, S3 for storage or EBS as part of their web-tier et al.
At the very start of a project, teams rarely consider questions related to ‘data’ more specifically, the data the application will produce, the data the application will use, when and where data will be moved across the wire, and how, when and where transactional data will be transformed into business insight that can be leveraged to drive incremental revenue streams.
In this podcast, Tom walks us through the ‘Six Sevens’ framework he and his team first articulated in this whitepaper: where ‘six’ represents the six data orchestration processes that exist in any project, ‘seven’ represents the seven foundational choices that occur in every project as well.These choices range from ‘which type of storage will be required’, to ‘what kind of PaaS will be needed to accomplish the project objectives’.
While these choices occur in every project, they are rarely addressed in any explicit and thoughtful way from the beginning (often leading to unforeseen consequences). The ‘Six Sevens’ framework provides a step-by-step approach to ensure all choices are well-reasoned and explicit.
Again, these choices inform all other aspects of software design including application architecture, technology stack choices and the cloud environments that will be leveraged to support your application in production. Adopting the Six Sevens as a complementary process will help improve the quality of your application software and help you avoid costly mistakes that could impact your company’s reputation, as well as its bottom line.
This was an insightful conversation, so we hope you enjoy the podcast. As always, if you had any ideas on topics you would like to see us address in the future or feedback generally, let us know.
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