This is a guest post from Alberto Arias Maestro, CTO and co-founder of ElasticBox
One of the biggest problems facing software engineers since the dawn of the multi-tier application is, well, how to make it multi-tier.
It’s more than just having several supporting applications – it is about connecting the layers correctly and allowing them to communicate with each other. All this is to create a scalable and responsive deployment that can be easily updated and adapted to changing business needs.
It is about ensuring that your infrastructure can co-ordinate the order in which your application tiers are spun up, even when the apps themselves have not been designed to perform these critical dependency checks.
What Are You Looking For?
Intelligently handling your solution’s dependencies is an inherent problem in multi-tier deployments – at whatever scale you are operating. For instance,
As a developer working on a project:
“I want to ensure that my database is up and running before my web-server is deployed.”
As the CTO of a rapidly growing startup:
“I want to bootstrap on basic AWS services (such as managed cache, load balancing, and managed databases), but as the product evolves, I want to give myself the freedom to evolve the services I connect to and consume – experiencing as little downtime as possible.”
As the Head of IT Operations of a large-scale enterprise:
“I need to reign in a heterogenous environment where I have hundreds of highly inter-dependent applications that range from just-released to legacy and everything in between.”
At ElasticBox, we’ve found a way to solve this problem using the concept of Boxes, and now, Bindings, a feature we are launching today.
‘Bindings’
ElasticBox lets you build and deploy complex, multi-tier applications using boxes as basic building blocks. Specifying a ‘binding’ from one box to another is a way to declare that there exists a dependency between the boxes.
It is a construct that allows the different tiers of a multi-tier applications to communicate with each other and exchange data.
Bindings enable users to introduce not just structure, but also flexibility to their multi-tier deployments. For example,
Our developer’s Apache Web-server Box can use a required binding to specify, that to launch correctly it needs a connection to a running MySQL DB instance.
Our startup CTO, who has been trying to make a choice between AWS SQS (Simple Queue Service) and RabbitMQ, can simply switch bindings, with his business application experiencing little to no downtime.
Our Head of IT Operations, can chain his applications so that they come up in the right order. He has the flexibility to modify this chain at anytime – to accommodate new applications or possibly remove old ones, without having to bring the entire system down. If you are thinking about deadlocks – don’t worry, bindings are designed to handle these.
On-Prem? Cloud?
For enterprises, bindings can be a very powerful way to evaluate different cloud strategies for business solution with minimal disruption to the existing deployment. Bindings allow switching between an AWS RDS instance and an on-prem database all with a single click.
As you can see from some of the use-cases above, ‘bindings’ is a powerful concept that solves a very prevalent problem in advanced deployments and provides users a simple way to evaluate different strategies. To learn more about how to incorporate bindings into your deployment, please visit our documentation. For a free consultation about how bindings can benefit your particular use-case, please email us at [email protected].