Transform Your Application Architecture by Bringing It Closer to Hardware

Over the last few decades, organizations have undergone significant IT transformations—moving away from legacy systems and on-premises data centers to cloud-native technologies and distributed architectures. Applications built over the last 10 years have become increasingly reliable and stable, while the processing capabilities have seen a significant surge. Advanced technologies such as AI and automation have introduced intelligence and capabilities that once seemed like science fiction. In this landscape, hybrid and multicloud models have become predominant because organizations understand the importance of workload placement and that each workload is suited to a different environment. They want flexibility and control, reliable performance and the optimal value for their technology investments.

The journey toward digital maturity involves countless steps and looks different for every company. Many businesses have already undergone significant strides in their digital transformation journey and are turning their focus toward optimization. Today, we have a combination of companies that were born in the cloud as well as those that rushed to put more workloads and applications in the cloud. The cloud has provided great flexibility, but many organizations are now seeing there are substantial benefits to having more control of their infrastructure. To deliver better performance, greater predictability and more financial control, more businesses are moving toward developing applications as close to the hardware layer as possible while keeping access to essential cloud services.

Traditionally, applications sit at the top of the IT infrastructure stack, and hardware like servers, storage and networking are at the bottom. Cloud service providers have introduced numerous layers of abstraction between applications and hardware in order to deliver their services at scale. But as IT leaders look for ways to optimize their architecture, they’re bringing development closer to the hardware, reducing the layers of abstraction so they can move faster and take better advantage of the technology at their disposal.

One of the most common ways to do this is by using cloud adjacent Bare Metal as a Service (BMaaS). In this blog post, we’ll discuss the primary factors that drive the optimization of your application architecture, how dedicated cloud can help, and the benefits of transforming your application architecture on Platform Equinix®.

Why you need to optimize your application architecture

There are a host of reasons why organizations want to transform their application architecture—pertaining to performance, costs, flexibility and control. Here are five of the most common motivations we see:

1. Enhanced security. Application security is a growing concern for many organizations due to increasing security threats. With dedicated cloud resources, your data and applications aren’t shared with other users, reducing the risk of security breaches and data leaks. You have greater control over your security measures and can implement custom security configurations based on your business needs.
2. Performance. For high-performance GPUs and Arm processors, developing applications closer to the hardware provides more secure and predictable application performance. And of course, performance directly correlates to customer experience. Therefore, many developers want to optimize the performance of their applications by programming directly to hardware.
3. Reliability. As applications mature, their performance and scaling needs become more stable and predictable. They become less reliant on the flexibility web services provide and can deliver comparable availability and scalability while benefitting from the increased operational awareness provided by single-tenant infrastructure.
4. The same tools and technologies. Modern digital infrastructure now embraces and supports most development tools, languages and management frameworks. Teams can quickly reapply their skills to automate their deployments on cloud adjacent BMaaS.
5. Doing more with less. Companies are always looking for ways to maximize the value they get from their IT investments. Whether you need to optimize your use of money, people or other resources, you probably need to do more with less. When your application architecture becomes predictable and automated, you can often achieve better financial control with BMaaS.

Transform your application architecture with dedicated cloud

To optimize your application architecture, you need a transformed infrastructure. This means rethinking application workload placement and taking advantage of the technologies that make infrastructure optimization possible. What workloads are best for the public cloud, and which ones are a better fit for what we call dedicated cloud? How do you access all the right services and capabilities for a given workload, wherever it lands?

Dedicated cloud delivers single-tenant infrastructure resources—bare metal—coupled with low-latency connectivity to critical cloud and IT services. This results in enhanced visibility, security and control compared to what the public cloud can provide. It’s advantageous for organizations that are looking to bring their application architecture closer to the hardware, because a dedicated cloud solution can help companies reduce the layers of abstraction.

Putting dedicated, bare metal infrastructure close to public clouds offers several other key benefits:

• Fast connectivity to take full advantage of cloud services wherever they are
• Reduced data transfer costs and complexities
• The benefit of bare metal performance, without the bare metal overhead, through self-service provisioning and automated management
• Greater control and visibility with fewer abstraction layers to manage and monitor
• Enhanced security and compliance, since your infrastructure isn’t shared with other users
• A higher degree of deployment customization than what’s usually offered in shared cloud environments

For many organizations, a cloud adjacent BMaaS solution like Equinix Metal® provides the right balance of control, predictable performance and cost savings, without sacrificing essential connectivity to data and services in public cloud platforms.

Automation is a key technology enabler for application development, and in the era of Everything as a Service (XaaS), modern and distributed businesses need secure, automated infrastructure so that they can run any type of application anywhere. The good news is that with dedicated cloud you can keep the same tools and technologies you’re used to. Equinix Metal delivers fully automated, on-demand access to dedicated hardware. In addition, you can use APIs and automation tools like Hashicorp Terraform and Red Hat Ansible, as well as container services like Kubernetes and Docker, to connect optimized applications with cloud services.

With a dedicated cloud solution on Platform Equinix, you can transform applications into modern, efficient, and scalable systems to increase agility and enhance developer productivity.

Learn more about how you can optimize your application architecture with Equinix Metal by downloading the Enterprise Strategy Group report Analyzing the Economic Benefits of Equinix Metal.