Introduction

Over the years, more businesses, big and small, have banked on app modernisation to derive optimal performance from their core business applications. At stake is an existential impetus to survive and thrive in an age of rapid multi-sectoral digitisation and explosive e-commerce growth. Organisations have been forced to modernise their existing APIs with re-platforming technologies like the cloud, and pricier, refactoring models in the form of containerization. The switch, involving both cost and complexity, has helped them add essential speed and a competitive edge to their operations.

Enterprises with an increased appetite for digital gains, but constrained by costs, fast-tracked their goals of agility and scalability by porting legacy apps to the cloud. Creating off-premises, multi-cloud, readily scalable repositories of data helped focus their use for boosting toplines and customer fulfilment. These changes, however, were incremental and gradual compared to the dizzying digital pivot that Covid-19 would set off.

Post-pandemic clarity: revising the norms

After the disruptions wrought by the pandemic, it quickly became apparent that bold and futuristic business investments yielded great results, while those firms that stuck to conservative business models languished. Today, business composability is a key quality for enterprises to embrace. At its core, business composability is both, a feature and a practice of good business that mandates a modular, approach to growth. It allows firms to better manage disruptions and market volatility by adopting certain cultural changes (a new mindset), technological changes (the strategic implementation of next-gen tech), and operational changes (enhanced capabilities that are optimised for adaptability rather than efficiency).

A micro-services-driven architecture represents a modular, compartmentalised approach to app modernisation.  As opposed to monolithic applications, microservices break down business process components into loosely coupled, single functions for streamlined, simplified, and continuous delivery and monitoring. As a result, a change in one service is independent of the change in another. Container technologies have emerged as a mainstream choice for running microservice applications. Kubernetes is the de facto choice for enterprises aiming to unlock developer productivity, app portability, and greater agility through the orchestration of containerised applications.

Kubernetes helps simplify your business transformation, as app modernisation becomes more complex and complicated with the provisioning of microservices. As an open-source container orchestration platform, it enables distributed workloads and decoupled applications, especially for cloud-native architectures. Beyond automation deployment, Kubernetes is configured to manage, scale up, scale down, and restart multiple containers. This model is well positioned to preserve the integrity, efficiency, continuity, and security of IT operations. Global enterprise usage of Kubernetes continues to march towards the 100% mark with most organisations either using or evaluating the technology for future use.  Emerging tech hubs are showing a major uptake of Kubernetes and other disruptive enterprise applications.

The enterprise application space has itself undergone unrecognisable change with a staggering array of new technologies and services up for grabs. The new customer-centric paradigm is fuelling the growth of multiple cloud and mobile applications and perhaps most importantly, open-source innovations, in the global enterprise market. The accompanying diversity creates complexity, heightened operational challenges, and growing pains for organisations of all stripes.

Though Kubernetes has greatly simplified the task of deploying container technology for application modernisation, managing the platform’s crucial orchestration framework on a day-to-day basis remains a complex undertaking. With public, private, and multi-cloud adoption enabling modernisation across the enterprise, developers and consumers are scouting for infrastructure-agnostic platforms and serverless capabilities that blur boundaries and ensure the best ROI for businesses. However, enterprises are encumbered by vendor lock-ins and increasing opportunity and adoption costs while selecting next-gen technologies that are beyond their current cloud service scope. An effective modernisation strategy must address the following needs of developers, agile enterprises, and consumers:

  • An orchestration layer that can deploy, scale, and heal applications in an infrastructure-agnostic way across cloud providers and other infrastructures/architectures.
  • An effective and ubiquitous deployment of services without the constraints of virtual private networks.
  • An intelligent application-aware networking capability that helps route the traffic as per the best cost performance metrics.
  • Standardising and managing open-source services and making them easier to consume across hyper scalers and cloud vendors.
  • Providing, managing, and troubleshooting distributed services at scale in the form of AI/ML-based workload processing, distributed databases etc.

Tata Communications IZO™ Cloud Platform for Kubernetes® Solutions addresses all these concerns to leverage latent opportunities. It offers best-in class managed platform services to help you simplify, optimise, and evolve across your modernisation journey. It enables you to granularly orchestrate infrastructure with an enterprise grade platform built for modern-day agile application deployment and a fully managed services layer to match it, on top. Our solution provides cluster management and security and helps eliminate complexity with managed open source services. Our CI/CD and Serverless Computing embed agility into both, the deployment and management of microservices. Our Backup and DR capabilities ensure optimal data retention and restoration, for business continuity and resilience.

Untangle complexity and unleash agility: the road ahead

At its very baseline, Tata Communications helps in improving developer productivity and help enterprises become future-ready. Our business philosophy underscores the importance of one dedicated partner, rather than a multi-vendor arrangement. This ensures that you can truly harness the power of Kubernetes to accelerate your modernisation journey with our IZO™ Cloud Platform for Kubernetes® Solutions.

Our solution is premised on years of experience as a private cloud provider to scores of customers across sectors. We incorporate best security practices in fine-grained detail, from the infrastructure to the underlying platform layer.

Accelerate your modernisation journey ahead with Kubernetes by optimising costs and enhancing performance with centralised logging and monitoring capabilities, automated cluster deployment, and version upgrades with minimal downtime. For more information on the Tata Communications IZO™ Cloud Platform for Kubernetes® Solutions. please visit this link.

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