Application Configuration Management: Overview

Many significant changes have occurred in the world of corporate IT since the late 1990's:

Network infrastructure has become inexpensive, fast, and increasingly stable.
Storage prices have steadily dropped; capacity and speed have increased dramatically.
Server infrastructure has been commoditized at low price points, raw server horsepower has markedly increased
New technologies like server virtualization have become almost commonplace.
IT organizations have embraced more process-centric management approaches like ITIL in addition to recognizing the benefits the overall organization reaps when IT embraces concepts like Business Service Management (BSM).

These changes have all brought great advances to IT and its ability to serve business needs in all organizations. At the same time, none of those changes have had any impact on applications themselves, the lifeblood of enterprise IT. Approaches to application development have changed (such as .Net and Java), but the basic approach to applications and application management has remained untouched.

This is where Trigence comes in. Trigence AE provides a new approach to Application Configuration Management (ACM) called Application Virtualization. This new approach greatly simplifies what it takes for IT to deploy and manage applications, while at the same time providing greater flexibility to align IT activities to business needs.

Common Pain Points in IT

For the last 15 to 20 years, all applications have shared one thing in common: before it is used, an application must be installed and configured onto a server or desktop computer. This installation process invariably - and by design - creates a complex web of dependencies for the application on the OS upon which it was installed. The dependencies include things such as shared libraries, OS configuration files and settings, and network identity attributes (e.g. hostname or IP address). These dependencies create numerous challenges for IT, including:

Outages can be caused by changes that affect one of an application's dependencies.
Dependencies, not business needs, dictate how IT manages a system (e.g., when patches are applied, if/how an application may be moved, etc.).
Applications require a high level of process uniqueness/complexity as each dependency must be accounted for in any management processes.

To overcome the challenges of managing applications and their dependencies, IT organizations have used various methods to cope. Often this comes at the expense introducing additional costs and management overhead. For example, IT groups learned early on not to install two applications on the same server due to the fact that changes made to support one application often caused problems with the second. With this lesson in mind, IT organizations began deploying one application per server, leading to server proliferation and generally low per-server utilization rates - and the increased complexity resulted in ballooning IT costs.

At the core, the problem is simple: as applications are installed, they become rooted to the OS upon which they are placed. The distinction between the installed application and the system on which it was installed is ambiguous at best. This has resulted in greater complexity, higher management costs, and limited flexibility.

A New Approach to ACM with Trigence

In looking at the challenges facing IT organizations, Trigence is taking the opportunity to directly address the root problem rather than trying to treat the symptoms. With Trigence AE, IT organizations can start to think differently about how they manage their applications and better service the business.

Trigence solves the "application rooted into the OS" problem through the introduction of Application Capsules, which dramatically change the Application Configuration Management landscape. With Application Capsules:

Applications are encapsulated with their dependencies intact, configured in the desired state, and become discretely manageable objects.
Applications are no longer tied to a given copy of the OS and may be run on a different installed copy of the OS or even a newer version of the OS.
The complex web of dependencies required by the application doesn't go away but is instead managed inside the context of the Capsule separately from the OS.
Deploying or moving an application becomes as simple as a file copy operation.
Applications may be treated as standardized parts with explicitly defined boundaries and standardized management interfaces.

To make Application Capsules a reality, Trigence has developed two pieces of technology that comprise the Trigence AE product. For more information about the different parts of Trigence AE, please see our Product Details page.

With Trigence AE, the world of Application Configuration Management changes for the better. Applications become discretely manageable objects. Standards are established as to how applications are understood and managed. Abstract application definitions become explicit. IT is able to focus more time, money, and energy on applications, which directly matter to the business, rather than infrastructure, which should be of minimal importance. Most importantly, costs are driven down as complexity is reduced and applications are treated as stand-alone entities.

An Intro to Trigence AE