Application Delivery in Less Time Than Making a Brew

Application Delivery in Less Time Than Making a Brew!

The world of application delivery is changing rapidly. Organisations are, for many reasons, moving towards hybrid-cloud environments, where applications are hosted both in on-premises data centres, and in public cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and GCP. At the same time, users want application delivery ‘on-demand’.

IT teams are struggling to keep up! With the increased complexity of delivering applications in hybrid-cloud environments, traditional approaches to application delivery are no longer viable, being too time-consuming, error-prone, and not easily scalable.

The Challenges of Delivering Applications Using Traditional Approaches

The traditional approach to application delivery is complex and involves many manual tasks. This approach also lacks the rapid scalability and flexibility. demanded by modern work models. Overall application delivery can be costly, slow and burdensome in processes across many teams in the business.

Introducing Merlin: The All-in-One Orchestration Platform

Merlin, an all-in-one orchestration platform developed by WhiteSpider, offers an innovative approach to application delivery in hybrid-cloud environments. Merlin provides IT management capabilities functions that are used by MSPs or Enterprise Operations, such as ITSM, CMDB, Lifecycle Management, Vulnerability Management, Log Analytics.

The newly developed ‘automation module’ takes Merlin to a new level. designed to simplify and streamline the delivery of applications in hybrid-cloud environments. It allows teams to automate the delivery of any application environment into any cloud. What’s more, this is done in real time – allowing applications to be built automatically in multiple clouds – done in the time it takes you to make a brew.

The Workflow of Merlin's Automation Capability

Importantly, building and delivering applications with Merlin is simple and intuitive. Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Definition:

• Users can define a standard application template, which may be based on lots of different services, such as web, database, authentication, etc. These could be standalone servers or could also be microservices sitting on docker.
• When the application template is defined, i.e., resources, memory, cores, storage, networking, naming etc, the template is made available in a repository that can be accessed by someone with specific RBAC access rights to the template.

Step 2: Delivery:

• This application template is then provided to teams responsible for the delivery of services and applications, who can then deliver new capabilities in a more agile fashion, (following the relevant delivery and security standards).

Step 3: Deployment:

• When an application needs to be deployed, the user customises the template for domain-specific attributes and allocates which clouds the application can be created in. This can be any, or multiple clouds e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure, Private Cloud or On-Premises data centre. This specific configuration is then used to create the terraform configuration that is passed, using the Merlin API, to the corresponding clouds and to start the instantiation process.
• Merlin shows the progress of the application delivery process, and the corresponding changes to DNS, GSLB and SLB infrastructure to access the application. This entire process typically takes around 2 minutes but can be faster depending upon the scale of the application being delivered, i.e., deploying 3 services is faster than 30 services.

Step 4: Expansion and Transformation:

• Merlin's Automation module allows users to easily scale applications, i.e., to add more services or reduce the size of it by deleting specific workloads. This allows dynamic application busting and contraction based on demand. Workloads can also be moved from cloud to cloud using the same principle.

The Benefits of Terraform Based Automation with Merlin

Reduce Time and Cost

Merlin's Automation module is a momentous change for organisations or MSPs looking to streamline their application delivery process and improve efficiency. By automating the process of delivering applications to different environments, organisations can reduce administration time from days to a couple of minutes. This not only saves time but also reduces costs, allowing organisations to focus on more strategic initiatives.

Simplify and Automate

Merlin transforms the approach to application delivery to meet the demands of modern work models. Its single, seamless platform for delivering applications to different environments simplifies the typically complex, multi-user, multi-team, multi-skilled traditional approach, making it more efficient and less prone to errors.

Application Performance and Agility

Merlin provides dynamic application transformation, providing real-time flexibility and agility to optimise performance.

• Dynamic bursting and contraction enable scaling up and down of applications based on demand.
• Automated migration of workloads from one cloud to another helps meet the changing demands of users and applications.

Operational Efficiency

Merlin's intuitive interface makes it easy to customise templates and deploy applications quickly. Its seamless integration with Terraform provides a powerful automation tool that can be used to deploy applications across a variety of cloud environments. The result is a more efficient and streamlined application delivery and management process.

Conclusion

Application delivery in hybrid-cloud environments is a complex and challenging process. The traditional approach to application delivery is time-consuming, error-prone, and lacks scalability and flexibility. With Merlin's Automation capabilities, you can streamline application delivery, reduce administration time, and improve efficiency. Merlin provides a powerful and flexible capability to deliver applications to different environments, with features like dynamic application bursting and contraction and migration of workloads from one cloud to another.

If you’re interested in learning more about Merlin and its capabilities – or if you want to put our claim to the test! - contact WhiteSpider today to schedule a demonstration.