The Evolution of Application Networking
The rapid growth of technology and organizations today has created a whole new set of challenges.
Organizations must stay modern while keeping existing technological investments, and their teams must be nimble while maintaining integration with other teams. Eventually, infrastructure becomes overly complex. At the same time, how we keep networks secure has evolved.
Combined, these challenges necessitate a new approach to application networking.
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Platform Engineering Practices
Platform engineering practices are part of this new approach. These practices allow for automation and simplification of tasks related to networking, security, and compliance, empowering application teams to work more efficiently and concentrate on delivering business value.
Concepts to Consider
To empower these teams, they need the best cloud-native tools. The concepts these tools should address are:
- Declarative configuration, which describes the desired state of infrastructure, applications, or other components, and then works to ensure that the actual state matches the declared state.
- Workload identity should be based on what workloads they are, how they map within the organizational structure, and that they do so independently of where they are deployed.
- Standard integration points make it easier to compose necessary pieces and simplify the integration of systems.
With these concepts in place, it’s easier to define the needs of a modern API, networking, and security stack. Get more details about these foundational concepts here.
Defining the Needs of Modern Networking and Security
In addition to the strong base outlined above, all services and communications in an organization need to be secured, managed, and observed. To achieve this, tools need to be flexible in terms of their environment, ability to scale, and changes in health.
Thus, a modern networking solution consists of these layers:
- Ingress/egress/APIs
- Service-to-service, hybrid/multi-cluster
- Baseline connectivity
The resulting solution is built from cloud-native principles, delivered through platform engineering, and maps better to organizational needs.
