What is a Cloud App?

We at iTKO are not claiming to coin the term “Cloud App” -- in fact a number of vendors out there have already been referring to cloud apps – for instance, vApps from VMware and others. But I wanted to frame the discussion around what cloud applications really are, and the challenges and benefits that will shape what cloud apps could be.

I do like that we can participate in this dialogue. We’ve been a part of many of the intermediate steps of making customers ready to have a cloud application over the last decade. The more distributed, service-based and loosely coupled applications have become, and the more they are connected through commoditized middleware and messaging, the more viable they therefore become as cloud applications.

Cloud apps must have these attributes, because without them, you would have a hard time delivering the value of Cloud to the business -- being able to interconnect various components from different vendors in different ways, and being able to do so in an on-demand basis.

For instance if I had 4 or 5 different service vendors underneath my application, I could elect to use Vendor A for a time, and then remotely switch to Vendor B for a similar service, based on price, availability, contractual reasons, what have you. This is an important concept, and not a new one. When we didn’t have Cloud applications and the ability to make that switch easily and remotely, the cost of switching was too high and thus, rarely happened.

The IT community tried to address this with SOA, to offer a “plug and play” capability for services, but the infrastructure didn’t allow for it. We did get service-oriented benefits around more modular programming, better reuse, and most importantly the distribution of business logic between teams, and a better way to get teams to iterate on development of components more quickly, without having to create a new application.

However, the ability to put the entire infrastructure in a service mindset really couldn’t have happened without a cloud infrastructure. So, Cloud Apps are just the next step in a journey you are already on. If you are building apps that are web-based, using web services, N-tier, with connected legacy systems, and service-based access to third-party systems or SaaS providers, you are already on your way to having a Cloud App.

The only difference is, you’ll now think of deployment as a service-based activity as well, and you will have a greater ability to switch from one provider to another, when it comes to acquiring and accessing those services.

I hope that explains what we mean by Cloud Applications, and you can expect to see more discussions on this topic here. Read more new content from iTKO on Cloud Apps:

• iTKO.com: iTKO LISA Solutions for Cloud Application Validation
• iTKO.com: iTKO LISA Solutions for Development & Test Clouds
• Blog: Chalk Talks on Cloud Applications - Part 1: What is a Cloud App?
• Blog: Cloudy Chalk Talk 2: Dev & Test Clouds in Pre-Production
• Blog: More About Dev & Test Cloud Environments from the Whiteboard
• Blog: Hidden Costs Off-the-Cloud: iTKO ChalkTalk