Originally posted on IBM Developer blog “Exploring PureApplication System, Software Service and more” by Chiara Bundle on 21 October 2013 (8383 visits)
While collaborating on the writing of the Redpaper “Cloud Computing Pattern of Expertise” I want to share my initial thoughts on pattern portability in the different cloud environments and how these can positively affect an adoption of a pattern-based approach at an enterprise level. Moreover I’d like to share the results we’re achieving in collaborating at an international level on this technology and who can benefit from this approach.
I’ll leave the technicalities and the detailed results of our work in the dedicated paragraphs of the Redpaper, but in future posts I’d like to share some of the highlights we’ve discussed during the creation and editing of the Redpaper and what we see as beneficial reading for you.
First of all, I want to point out that patterns are not a product out-of-the-box feature, but are the best way to create your recipe, which can combine all of the expertise acquired during years of complex infrastructure management tasks to optimize and automate software deployment. Patterns describe, in a logical way, a repeatable solution based on various images, middleware, applications, and runtime configurations. The result of a deployed pattern is a configured, tuned, and optimized application environment.
The aim of Patterns of Expertise is to create a repeatable approach and an easily deployable environment. This expertise applies to different IT areas, such as:
• Installation
• Configuration
• Optimization
• Management of an environment
In the new world of “clouds” (several private or public cloud), patterns provide a dynamic and efficient usage of IT resources with consistent results while building complex solutions, which leads to a saving in time, money and resources. Read the Redpaper introduction to learn who are the impacted IT professionals and the benefit they can gain in such an approach.
I’d like to simply stress the focus on what happens when using a pattern: instead of spending (and wasting time) on just infrastructure requirements, products’ technical notes and afford problems in installation and basic configuration, you use an “abstraction layer” that will let you leverage a highly optimized and automated solution with built-in features to manage high availability and dynamically react to changing conditions based on your policies defined to accomplish specific business level requirements.
So, when you adopt virtual application patterns as we describe in the Redpaper, deployment tasks require minimal knowledge of the underlying middleware infrastructure, and you can iterate multiple instances of the same application, thus providing the lowest total cost of ownership and shortest time to value.
Hope you’ll have the chance to understand and use this repeatable and secure pattern approach: I encourage you to learn more by reading the chapter on pattern value and pattern portability.
Feel free to comment and share any thoughts on this topic!
IBM Cloud Pak System 