Continuous Delivery of Composite Solutions: A Case for Collaborative Software Defined PaaS Environments

Abstract

To help drive top line growth of their businesses, the development and IT organizations are under increasing pressure to create and deliver applications at ever faster paces. The advent of Cloud Computing has not only lowered the cost of IT operations but also enabled the notion of continuous delivery, which promises to radically reduce frictions in DevOps processes and speed up the product delivery cycle. With increased demand on functionality and feature, we have also seen these applications becoming more sophisticated, often integrating multiple modern programming models and techniques with the traditional n-tier web application into a composite application. This paper proposes an architectural blueprint for improved continuous delivery of these complex composite applications. It treats a solution as a holistic entity comprised of application logic and software-defined environment that the logic relies on. It also proposes a collaborative approach to software-defined Platform-as-a-Service environment building. This being an ongoing research project, this paper also briefly describes prototype, work-in-progress and thoughts on future directions.