Application development has been moving in the direction of platform abstraction. That is, the need for developers to have detailed knowledge of the infrastructure that the application was being deployed on was becoming less important with increasing sophistication of the application platform for which they were developing. Cloud computing is now reversing this course of action, at least in the short term.

Actually, the platform abstraction is a bit of a misnomer since the implementation resulted in operations struggling to tweak the infrastructure to meet performance requirements. Additionally, most applications typically had their own dedicated hardware allowing for specialization to meet the needs of the applications deployed on that hardware.

So, more accurately, cloud computing illustrates the flaws in the approach of pure platform abstraction and a ‘Chinese Wall’ between application development and operations as operations now has fewer tweaks at their disposal to make an application perform in a multi-tenancy environment. Hence, it is imperative that application architects begin to incorporate into their design the impacts of operating in the cloud into their architectures. Application architects must be able to understand how the application will perform given the environment that the application will be operating under.

Impacts that application architects will need to think about in this cloud world include:

• Databases – running a highly-available database in the cloud is a daunting task; especially without direct control over the storage. Environments like Amazon offer database services that deliver greater performance than can be achieved if you put up your own database in their IaaS, but there are also pitfalls.
• Software failover – applications can now implement failover far less expensively using commodity hardware. Hence, failover should now be developed into the application instead of relying on the application platform or hardware infrastructure. Given that application architects have not focused on this use case in many cases, it will require some education and experience before this can become common.
• Virtual networking – virtual networks enable the application development team to take control over their own application’s networking infrastructure. Once again, the lack of experience here means that there are likely to be many misconfigurations that impact the performance and availability of the application in addition to enabling security flaws.
• Instrumentation, logging and monitoring – these are areas that the application development teams have been pushing responsibility off onto the application platforms. However, without visibility beyond the hypervisor, it’s imperative that they incorporate this back into the applications or they may have significant issues troubleshooting or auditing their applications.

As my famous Uncle Winthrop liked to say, “Now that I’ve given you a band saw, I need to teach you how to use it or you will just be wasting a lot of wood and in the worst case might lose a few fingers.”