Unless you live under a rock in the world of cloud computing, you’re probably aware of a growing generational gap between public clouds and enterprise IT.
Public clouds versus enterprise IT
Consider the size of budgets public cloud companies invest in R&D. The budgets are astronomically huge when you compare to the budget of a typical enterprise IT. This economy of scale is only going to widen with time. Most enterprises will be unable to match the scale or technical expertise of public clouds in their private datacenters.
This gap forces innovative developers in enterprises to play mavericks. They bypass traditional IT departments and operate outside enterprise control to look for the next-generation services and infrastructure. To avoid this gap, IT should focus not on provisioning infrastructure. But provide infrastructure and application components as a service to empower developers.
IT service catalog
Service catalogs are the wave of the future for IT teams. It sets them up to serve as true internal service providers to their customers who are mainly developers, QA, and the like.
A service catalog provides components to build your app. It is a collection of services that organize the available technology resources within an organization. Just as how you combine Legos to build a model ship, in the same way, you can combine services from the catalog to model the changing needs of applications.
At ElasticBox, we take the service catalog to the next level with an ABC approach.
A for Abstraction
We firmly believe that a service catalog should let you build applications flexibly. That means you should have the freedom to pick and choose what OS, runtime, database, web server, or more fit your application needs. The box model in ElasticBox is designed to provide exactly that kind of abstraction.
B for Binding
Imagine that you choose an OS, platform, runtime, web server, application server, database, and configuration management tool from the service catalog. What’s the next logical step? To connect them so that the application layers communicate properly over the network, right?
A binding in ElasticBox lets you define such connections easily. It lets you tie together new or already deployed components of an application though they live on different virtual servers and clouds.
C for Composition
The DNA of a service catalog is to be able to compose different application components together. How is that important for an enterprise? It makes them agile. To build and deploy multiple applications reliably, fast, and at scale, the service catalog should have a common set of services and components that serve the needs of multiple applications.
Depending on your application needs, you select the services, components from the service catalog and compose the application parameterizing each component within the context of the application.
In the process, you achieve DevOps at scale with a service catalog that provides a common set of services and components you reuse across applications. See how the ElasticBox service catalog can help you.
The ABC service catalog approach though enterprise focused benefits innovative developers. It gives you the freedom to adapt and respond fast to the changing demands of a business. Any business with feet planted firmly in the future should adopt service catalogs to meet the needs of their development teams and drive value throughout the enterprise.
