3 Videos on How Apps Will Be Deployed In the Future

There is beauty in simplicity.

We’ve come a long way since programming via punched cards. Now, we have observatories in our pocket because many tools to help us simplify software.

A recent article spoke of how installation and provisioning is getting simpler. This is part of a wave of technology innovation that is aimed at every part of the application lifecycle. The main goal is to figure out a way to take weeks of work and make it happen at the push of a button, streamlining development, making routine tasks repeatable and eliminating errors.

With the advent of vFabric Application Director, we can assemble full applications from a software and infrastructure catalog, add dependencies and custom configuration logic, and press a single button to deploy them in minutes. This isn’t magic—it’s still work, but the work is much greatly simplified and more automated. In fact, VMware’s own IT uses it to power our internal infrastructure, and cites that it saves 90% of time and 30% of the cost of deploying applications.

We say these impressive numbers, but what it looks like in action makes it all the more impressive. To see what we mean, we recommend the following 3 videos to watch:

Video 1—Overview Video for VMware Application Management & Application Director
Our only illustrated video in the list, this video uses graphics to help visualize in under 5 minutes the process flow changes and benefits of adopting a modern, cloud-savvy approach to deploying and managing apps. As a bonus, this video also shows how Application Performance Manager takes over management of the deployed applications gracefully.

Video 2—Creating an Application Blueprint
This short video shows Application Director in action. Once played, it is easy to see how application components are separated from standardized application components, and how with a easy-to-understand, drag-and-drop user interface, you can create a customized application deployment that is repeatable plan in under 5 minutes.

Video 3—Creating the Self-Service Application Deployment Environment for Your Company
The key to making this new style of deployments really work for enterprises is to separate application deployment and management entirely from IT’s core operations. We discussed this last year in the post How IT Will Come Out On Top of the Cloud. To be successful, most companies build a portal where users have access to request their applications, an approval process can be invoked, and the entire deployment is automated. End users are separated from the infrastructure operations through the end user interface of the portal and Application Director, ensuring IT as much control as they like over what kinds of middleware is deployed and how it is approved to be deployed.

Bonus:
To help users make deployments even faster, VMware has created a marketplace where users can find and download ready-to-use components and complete blueprints to deploy their apps. VMware seeded the marketplace with VMware applications, and recruited dozens of partners to contribute their best practice application service configurations and application blueprints. To see how easy it is, check out a post by a newbie VMware employee and how he got a Clustered Oracle Application up in just 20 minutes.