DevNet Create: Where Applications meet People, Places, Things, the Cloud, and Business
I wrote a post on the industry transformation we are in on Where Applications Meet Infrastructure. We are moving from a world of monolithic applications riding on a rigid compute/network/storage infrastructure to a world of modern applications built on a programmable infrastructure. With the Internet of Things, the Cloud, and new developer platforms and tools, developers are empowered to build modern applications that transform society, disrupt business, and change the world.
I view this as a transformation of Where Applications Meet Infrastructure, “Infrastructure” is a word that is used in many ways, so let me expand. My definition of Where Applications Meet Infrastructure includes Where Applications Meet People, Places, Things, the Cloud, and even Business.
Where Applications meet People : Applications are fundamentally changing how people communicate and collaborate with each other and how they interact with the places and things around them. The infrastructure is providing communication services such as voice, video, and messaging and allowing collaboration between individuals, teams, and communities. This fundamentally changes how innovation is done.
Applications are providing people with new user interfaces that extend beyond a keyboard and mouse and mobile devices. New user interfaces are becoming more human, with speech interfaces and wearable devices like watches that use touch and provide tactile feedback. User interfaces are also becoming more rich with technologies like augmented and virtual reality. These UI advances allow applications to more naturally and more deeply integrate into our everyday lives.
Most importantly, we know that successful application design is not just about the UI, but a much fuller design thinking process around the users and operators of the applications and the infrastructure. Who is using the application? Who is running the application? What problems are they trying to solve? Design thinking allows applications to truly become a part of people’s daily workflow and help them with what they are trying to achieve.
Where Applications meet Places : Applications are not just software running on a device, rather, applications are interacting with digitized places, such as buildings, shopping malls, manufacturing plants, train stations, cars, and your home. The infrastructure is not just networking, compute, and storage, rather it extends to places through whiteboards, video conferencing systems, and building and home automation systems.
The infrastructure not only provides connectivity, but it also provides services such as indoor location services from wireless access points and proximity services using beacons. This further ties applications to places, and allows developers to create customized, personalized, location-specific experiences.
Where Applications meet Things : Applications are now touching the Internet of Things, which means that appliances, machinery, sensors, vehicles, and devices are all connected to and controlled by applications. These Things are part of the infrastructure that an application can use. These Things create a tremendous amount of data that must be carried by the network and analyzed on the devices, in the cloud, or at edge computing nodes close to where the IoT data enters the network. Developers need a model to write applications for accessing and controlling Things and for analyzing the data they produce; and they need a way to run these applications on the device, in the Cloud, or at the edge.
Where Applications meet the Cloud : Applications are running on a cloud infrastructure that provides easy access to compute resources around the globe. This press-of-a-button access to global compute resources is empowering for developers, but must work within the confines of businesses that must handle sensitive mission critical business and customer data. It is now understood that for many businesses “the Cloud” is a hybrid of public and private clouds and is in fact multiple clouds. Applications must be designed and architected for multi-cloud environments while satisfying business and regulatory requirements.
Furthermore, application development is changing with powerful new developer tools and DevOps practices. Containers and microservices are fundamentally changing how applications are designed and built and DevOps is changing how applcations are managed and operated. New technologies and developer tools are evolving rapidly, but the community must come together to bring this to widescale practice and deployment.
Where Applications meet Business : Applications are not just providing user experiences, but they are integrating with business systems and creating business value. Applications and infrastructure provide information and intelligence about what people are doing and how applications are being used. This provides usage information that translates to improved application performance, business insights, and new and disruptive business models.
Through these simple examples, I hope you can see the transformation and the opportunity ahead in how Applications meet Infrastructure. There is more to discuss on how applications and infrastructure integrate information, intelligence, and security and the development tools, platforms, and APIs that enable this.
Please join us at DevNet Create on May 23–24, 2017 to share and discuss your thoughts on this area. Contribute a presentation, learning lab, and hands-on workshop now. Also, please contribute a post here to advance the conversation! We’d love to consider your contribution for publication in our DevNet Create blog.
