On-demand App-to-App Cloud Connectivity
“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” ― Steve Jobs
“Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television.”― Woody Allen
Free “Enterprise”
In the Information Technology (IT) world, the word “enterprise” is bandied about quite often. First, I really have no idea how to bandy about. If it involves incense and oils, I may have an idea, but let’s talk about enterprises instead.
If you do some serious digging, you’ll find out an enterprise is a federation, in other words, a collection of related business units with a common goal of profitability. It is an aggregate, dynamic yet unified entity that provides a product or service to benefit customers in return for revenue and profit. You’ll probably hear “enterprise” loosely and actually incorrectly used interchangeably with “company” or “business”.
Federation of Plan Its
As most of us are well aware, the success of this type of federation is very dependent on its network of vendors, service providers, partners and even the IT systems of its customers. In other words most enterprises rely on their supply chain network (tip: instead use “cooperative cloud ecosystem” at your next evening event with tragically hip baristas to get smiling nods of approval). This cooperative ensemble usually includes information management, purchasing, inventory, manufacturing, process-flow, logistics, research/development, distribution and customer service. This is true regardless whether you are a large retailer, a telecom provider, an investment bank or a television network.
This means a spectrum of enterprise applications needs connectivity with other applications and services. Trading systems, real-time inventory, big data analytics, complex event processing, systems monitoring and management, mobile notifications, social media sentiment analysis, et al, increasingly require traversal across multiple organizational boundaries. And today, many of these applications reside in IT systems off-premises within a cloud provider outside of the traditional firewall.
A Storm in Any Port
So the success of the “enterprise” now depends on a federation of organizations, integrating multiple external applications over multiple firewalls opening multiple ports (and maintaining friendships with your poker-playing buds in the InfoSec group). It is an atmosphere where the art of negotiation becomes more critical rather than mandating localized governance. And it’s an environment that clearly demonstrates and reinforces why agility and technology standards are truly useful.
Summarized, an enterprise is in the B2B2B2B2B2B [take a breath] B2B2B2B2B2B business with A2A2A2A2A2A connectivity needs.
Make it Sew
The usual answer for application-to-application (A2A) connectivity is a traditional Virtual Private Network (VPN), which has been around since the mid-90’s, i.e., before Clinton/Lewinsky and stained blue dresses. Heck, VPNs were invented in a time when Google didn’t even exist, Amazon was called Cadabra, and Altavista was your Google.
Over the past decade, VPNs have done an excellent job of connecting data centers, cloud infrastructures and other large networks. Large cloud vendors such as Amazon even offer virtual private clouds (VPC) along with hardware Gateways to create a VPN. There are clear use cases for traditional VPNs.
But there are some significant downsides to traditional and cloud-based VPNs for modern, on-demand A2A communication.
- The on-boarding process can be onerous especially between external organizations, despite the straightforward technology setup.
- They typically allow low-level potentially dangerous access especially if home computers are used to access corporate assets.
- VPN Access control usually uses the hard-to-manage, black list model.
- They present huge surface areas with many attack vectors for hackers to exploit.
- VPN vendor hardware and software are not always interoperable or compatible. A particular VPN architecture may not be suitable across multiple VPN vendors.
- They are not easy to manage in an agile, constantly changing federated environment.
- VPNs may require additional infrastructure for mobile devices that experience disconnects, cross-application network connection retries, additional security, etc.
- Even one VPN can be quite difficult for a business unit to deploy, maintain and understand the security issues. In a business-driven cloud services world, this reduces agility for the revenue generators in an enterprise.
- VPN products typically offer poor user experiences.
- TCP and Web VPN requirements are not necessarily the same. This drives up costs. In terms of security,
- Do legacy VPNs fit in a multi-cloud, on-demand, microservices world?
Certainly feels time for a makeover, doesn’t it?
Standard Orbit with KWIC
As I mentioned in the last KWICies, the web standards bodies (IETF and W3C) blessed the WebSocket standard back in 2011. And right after those standards came out, we saw simple web push applications with WebSocket replacing Comet/Reverse-AJAX on some websites. But we need to recall, WebSocket is not just a formally standard API; it is also an application protocol similar to HTTP. It provides on-demand, fat pipe connectivity that’s web-friendly. Think about that for a few milliseconds (btw, which is about the same time a message can flow over a WebSocket across the web). It’s a full-throttle, TCP-like connection that is web-friendly. And it’s an excellent foundational substrate to use for agile A2A for the modern enterprise. This is the basis of KWIC and why its perfectly suited for today’s A2A connectivity.
“I have spent my whole life trying to figure out crazy ways of doing things. I’m telling ya, as one engineer to another – I can do this.” -[any non-Googlian guesses?]