Microservices and Containers in the Middleware World

Blog: The Tibco Blog

The IT world is moving forward fast. I blogged about TIBCO’s “Cloud First and Docker” vision a few months ago: Docker Containers in the TIBCO Universe. Today, in April 2016, many customers have already adopted containers and cloud-native architectures or are in the process of adoption. It is time for an update about the relevance of microservices, containers, docker, and cloud-native architectures in the middleware world.

Developer Conference JPoint 2016 in Moscow

Last week, I gave two talks at JPoint in Moscow, Russia. The first was an existing talk about a hot topic entitled “How to Apply Big Data Analytics and Machine Learning to Real Time Processing”.

My second talk is brand new: “Microservices and Containers in the Middleware World”. This article discusses and shows my new slide deck about how middleware is related to microservices, containers, docker and cloud-native architectures.

Key takeaways of the talk

A cloud-native architecture enables flexible and agile development
Modern middleware leverages containers, microservices and a cloud-native architecture
Just using Jenkins and Docker is not enough

A cloud-native architecture for middleware

Cloud-native development and deployment enables:

Scalable services
Resiliency
Automatic load balancing and failover
DevOps
Usage of public cloud platforms, as well as private or hybrid
Vendor-agnostic deployment
Shorter time to results and increased flexibility

With all this, you can focus on solving your business problems instead of spending your time with plenty of technical issues in static and inflexible legacy architectures. The following requirements are relevant for building a cloud-native architecture:

Microservices and containers

Independent Services
Flexible Deployment

Continuous integration and continuous delivery

Scripting and automatic test and deployment
Service discovery
Dynamic distributed configuration management

Scalability and failover

Cluster management (scheduling and orchestration)
Load balancing (server-side and client-side)
Resilience design patterns

Cloud-native platform

Self-service agile infrastructure
Private, public, hybrid PaaS

TIBCO’s cloud-first strategy includes several products, which support cloud-native architectures (e.g. TIBCO BusinessWorks Container Edition or TIBCO Mashery). A lot of new products and updates of existing products are coming in the near future. In the upcoming years, a cloud-native architecture will be relevant for many components in all of TIBCO’s areas: integration, event processing, and analytics.

Slide Deck: “Microservices and Containers in the Middleware World”

These slides discuss requirements for a cloud-native architecture, available platforms such as Docker, Kubernetes, Apache Mesos, or Cloud Foundry, and how all these components are related to middleware:

Microservices, Containers, Docker and a Cloud-Native Architecture in the Middleware World from Kai Wähner

I am really looking forward to discuss cloud-native middleware with TIBCO customers and prospects in the next months, including at the upcoming user conference next month, TIBCO NOW.