Integration Engineering Costs and Complexity will continue to grow as businesses move to software configured virtualized environments (the cloud)

The problems of the past did not go away, they just continue to grow in complexity as environments grow. There is a mathematical, formula that shows that as the number of sub-components grows then the number of interconnections that must be managed grow at an exponential or even geometric rate. When you add more components into an environment, each component interacts with the other component.

When you move applications from a legacy platform (such as a mainframe or datacenter server) to a cloud, you are actually moving it from a physical device to one that you have designed in software. Cloud platforms, (be it a virtualized environment in your data center, a private cloud instance or a public cloud instance, or SaaS offering from a third party) are defined in software. You get to decide on the properties of the processors, the primary and secondary memory, and even the specifications of the network, all in software, and the platforms make these attributes available to your application. And the great thing is you can scale up or scale down the environment as needed.

With this flexibility comes another level of complexity, you must define the relationship between each system sub-component. This was always the case even when you ran applications on discrete systems in the data center. But now the cloud makes it so much easier, but the number of systems you will have to manage can be so much greater. Because you can create images of virtual environments and spin them up and down as needed, doesn’t stop them from needing to be connected to all the other systems, and this still needs layers of messaging middleware to be configured, just now even more connections than ever before.

Tools and layers like docker and Kubernetes make much more complex configurations practical, but delivering massive systems is not without complexity and risk. The processes needed to manage change are still the same processes. Every change needs to be managed through the change management lifecycle of Identify potential change -> Analyze change request -> Evaluate change -> Plan change -> Implement change -> Review change -> Close change.

With the volume of change requests associated with cloud environments growing rapidly, this can lead to change management fatigue that can lead to mistakes that can have a devastating effect on the business. It can seem amazingly fast to implement changes in the cloud, much faster than in previous environments. But reliability and adherence to the process can not be allowed to deteriorate, even when the pressure on the business is driven to ever-faster changes.

Risk is still the enemy.

The tool kits that come with each messaging middleware platform (IBM MQ, IIB, Tibco EMS, Kafka, Rabbit MQ, Active MQ, etc.) have become a lot simpler to use, but they have all uniformly failed to deliver the levels of automation, security, privacy and self-service that are needed to allow cloud levels of scale to be delivered without a massive additional investment in people and process. And none of these platforms provide cross-platform functionality that would allow multiple messaging middleware environments to be managed in a consistent way.

That is why you need Nastel Navigator. Navigator provides a single pane of glass approach to cloud-based cross-platform centralized management with the ability for the messaging middleware administrator to delegate specific functions to development and QA teams while maintaining full admin control. Basic automation functionality such as scheduling, rollback, and changelogs are then available, functionality that just does not exist in the toolkits that are provided with each messaging middleware platform.

Nastel Navigator can save a business that is migrating to the cloud many thousands of FTE hours of work, and deliver class-leading security, privacy, and reliability along the way.

This is why many of the world’s most successful companies reply on Nastel as their messaging middleware management layer.

We would love to understand your requirement and show you exactly how we can make your cloud migration faster, cheaper, and more reliable.