The worldwide IT landscape is changing and transforming towards public, private, or hybrid cloud. This is the future for which you must prepare. With dominant cloud providers like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and IBM Cloud, we are faced with a great range of diversified solutions for PaaS platforms, with another upcoming breakthrough in the shape of serverless infrastructures.
Everyone tries to fit the existing monolithic infrastructures, on-premises microservices, and any other existing IT solutions into the patterns of ready-to-use toolsets like Azure Service Fabric, Event Hubs, Storages, AWS Lambdas, Bluemix, and Cloud Foundry.
Accomplishing this challenge will allow us to avoid reinventing the wheel and instantly start profiting from a number of features that provide guaranteed scalability, high availability, deployment automations, and much more to rapidly design and scale solutions to address your business needs with an easily predictable cost structure.
However, while building a new solution from scratch could be neat and clean, perfectly fitting vendors’ design patterns, it becomes much more complicated to properly merge the existing IT environment, including all legacy solutions, technological debts, and the need to preserve multiple pieces on premises.
On the one hand, the provided PaaS solutions are usually open to different technologies but are still focused more around the technology bound to the vendor, i.e., .NET for Azure, Java for IBM and AWS, etc. It affects the availability of SDKs, APIs, and key strengths within one or the other of the technology stacks.
Planning today for an unknown future, we would like to feel free in terms of easily and rapidly switching between different PaaS solutions and cloud vendors whenever we identify that another one will more effectively address our needs. Moreover, in the transition phase, we must take some legacy components and put them as they are in the single nodes of the future distributed environment or mix different components to easily access existing on-premises infrastructure in one technology from the new tech stack we use in the cloud.
Whatever the reason might be, the golden mean would be to break free from the cloud PaaS technology and get unrestricted access to the interface from the PaaS technologies to our components; reach out from cloud workers to different data access components, queues, and processes; pay no fines for becoming tied to a particular technology stack; and finally, keep single-process performance, which is much faster than cloud cross-node HTTP-based connections.
A trend that is becoming popular in the community is in-process runtime bridging, which allows for tight coupling of different technologies in a single process, with containers, workers, workflow steps, or on-premises agents opening access to other technologies. With this approach, we can easily move away from the technology layer problem of the PaaS container, connect and integrate legacy systems, orchestrate cloud management, integrate data layers, and much more.
Javonet addresses these needs by separating you completely from these integration challenges and allowing you to instantly get the independent pieces running under any cloud, shift easily, and integrate legacy systems or components.
I have created below some simple diagrams that show a variety of scenarios of how a runtime-bridging component like Javonet could isolate you from the technology of the PaaS service.
Javonet is a single-file solution, so it can be very easily added to any .NET or Java worker, process, container, or function with no dependency on any other external components. The only prerequisite is to have both Java and .NET runtimes available on the underlying OS.
This way, developers can very flexibly mix, merge, and move on-premises pieces into the cloud, allowing them to mix technologies with no restrictions and rapidly deliver integrated solutions while avoiding the risks of delays or budget overruns.
Javonet can be used both through a standard API that talks directly to the required component or with our new online service, Javonet.io, which instantly generates strongly typed wrappers, which are the components in the technology of your choice that hide the entire integration and foreign component inside them. This way, developers get seamless experience as if their modules had been created in their desired technology.
Bottom line
Having a complex environment, transitioning to the cloud, mixing technologies, merging with another entity based on a different technology stack—in all these cases, it’s worth considering using an in-process runtime bridge to resolve all the toughest issues and open your development teams up to seamless integration within cloud nodes, containers, on-premises agents, workflow systems, and existing components, monolith systems, legacy components, and mainframe systems. That will let you smoothen the transition, speed up deliveries, and free yourself from PaaS technology, giving you the space to easily switch to other vendors and solutions if needed.