Introducing Wipro AppAnywhere
AppAnywhere is a managed service comprised of a set of tightly integrated technologies that together deliver end-to-end automation of container-based IT lifecycle to enterprises while guaranteeing required operational and business SLAs.
As an executive at Wipro whose team focuses on the success of our large enterprise customers, I’ve been involved in the technology strategies of large enterprises for years. And while containers have been discussed, evaluated, and initially deployed over the last few years — it looks like 2019 will be the year that containers conquer the world — spreading well beyond their initial footholds in application development to become a fundamental building block of enterprise IT. Originally started as a container orchestration platform for non-mission critical workloads, Kubernetes has fast become the preferred platform for application development and operations of much of enterprise IT. I meet almost every day with clients and prospects that are starting to convert existing applications to microservice architectures as a part of their adoption of Kubernetes. While Kubernetes provides common APIs for developers and IT teams and helps enterprises to avoid becoming locked into a given provider, enterprise SLAs remain essential. Though Kubernetes has many advantages, its dynamism, portability, and the ecosystem of related solutions can make it challenging for enterprises that are more familiar with approaches that are slower to change and apparently easier to control.
At Wipro, while technologies change our values are ever constant. We do whatever it takes to help our customers achieve the outcomes they need to succeed. We research new technologies to embrace and extend so that we can continue to deliver enterprise-level SLAs with ever greater capabilities while retaining cost efficiency — which means our customers can get more done, faster, while controlling their spending. Partnering with industry leaders, we also build solutions that extend open source components like Kubernetes to deliver new capabilities.
Driven by the needs of our customers, we have taken this approach to build a unique set of capabilities including hardware, software, and services that we call “App Anywhere”.
App Anywhere is the only solution available today for Global 2000 enterprises that automates the entire IT lifecycle for cloud native applications while delivering the freedom from lock-in and innate agility of Kubernetes based systems — all built upon best of class solutions from our partners HPE and RedHat as well as other solution providers from the cloud-native ecosystem.
I’m especially proud of the work our own deep bench of software engineers has done to meet and exceed the requirements of our customers in building AppAnywhere.
Introducing AppAnywhere
AppAnywhere delivers the agility, cost savings, and flexibility of Kubernetes via a unique architecture that allows enterprises to build, deploy and operate cloud native applications in the multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud environments of their choice, free from lock-in into underlying systems.
Features and benefits
- Composable hardware for reduced cost: The hardware is composable and is optimised for cost and efficiency.
- Best of class Kubernetes: RedHat OpenShift comes as a default choice for Kubernetes. AppAnywhere also supports other leading Kubernetes solutions such as SuSE CaaS, Rancher and VMWare PKS.
- ServiceMesh: Services are authenticated and controlled through the Istio service mesh.
- No cloud lock-in via cross-cloud data layer: Avoiding provider lock-in is one of the primary requirements of our customers. To achieve this, cross-cloud data mobility is built into AppAnywhere. This is known as DMaaS or data migration as a service.
- Continuous assurance: Chaos engineering is woven into theAppAnywhere service as well. Chaos is introduced into the production systems to test and assure resiliency. As a recipient of managed service, customers get transparent visibility into the resiliency of the underlying systems. Chaos engineering directly helps us to achieve our enterprise level SLAs.
- Cross-cloud visibility: AppAnywhere includes a cross-cloud control panel called Gecko. Gecko provides comprehensive visibility of the Kubernetes resources and services across all the deployments through a single easy-to-use portal.
- 360 degree support tools: Logs, monitoring and topology views are available to both customers as well as Wipro through Gecko. This helps in delivering value-added support services to the developers using AppAnywhere services. Developers now get per workload logging and visibility automatically.
- Opex billing: The entire service is charged on a pay-per-use model, a similar model to the cloud providers with the added benefit of being delivered to enterprises on-premise.
- Multi-level control, authentication, and alerts: Role-based reporting and access control are provided as part of the service so that both customers and Wipro engineers may participate as desired at various levels of infrastructure management and monitoring. Alerts are extended to ChatOps to both customer and as well as the Wipro service delivery team.
AppAnywhere service components
Composable Hardware
We are extremely happy to be extending our partnership with HPE to embrace their HPE synergy platform to provide composable hardware for AppAnywhere. It is amazing to see HPE’s continued level of innovation and focus on customer success.
Best in class Kubernetes
RedHat OpenShift and other leading Kubernetes distributions are fundamental parts of AppAnywhere. We also have teams at Wipro that have become well versed in Istio as our ServiceMesh of choice for AppAnywhere. Thanks in part to Istio and our tooling around Istio we are able to provide an unprecedented level of control and visibility down to the level of each microservice. Done right, with our focus on execution and enterprise requirements, I’m confident that our customers can have both the flexibility and dynamism of container environments plus the control and visibility needed to scale their usage of AppAnywhere and containers with confidence.
AppAnywhere Gecko
“AppAnywhere Gecko” is developed by Wipro to provide integrated managed services solutions on top of Kubernetes. Gecko is offered both as a SaaS solution which runs on Wipro’s own platform and is shared across customers or as On-Premise dedicated platform for each customer. Gecko provides Data Migration as a Service (DMaaS) feature for application mobility using which the applications can be moved across various Kubernetes clusters. Apart from DMaaS Gecko provides comprehensive visibility, support tools, Opex billing support and more. It supports a variety of ways for dividing tasks within the enterprise and between the enterprise and Wipro thanks in part to extensive hooks into existing IT management systems and the addition of ChatOps as well.
Summary
Kubernetes is helping IT becoming more agile. And on the surface, the dynamism of containers and microservices can seem risky to the world’s largest enterprises especially as the enterprise expectations of SLA are only increasing.
Out of this apparent tension between the need for flexibility and agility and the iron-clad requirements of enterprises was born AppAnywhere, a managed service from Wipro comprised of a set of tightly integrated technologies that together deliver end-to-end automation of container-based IT lifecycle to enterprises while guaranteeing required operational and business SLAs.
Our customers, many of whom helped us to design AppAnywhere, are responding extremely positively to our approach. Together with our partners and the broader cloud native community we are delivering to enterprises the flexibility and dynamism of container environments plus the control and visibility needed to scale their usage of AppAnywhere and containers with confidence.
On a personal note, I’d really welcome your feedback. While I spend most of my time working with large enterprises and marshalling the enormous resources of Wipro and our partners to address their needs — the creation of AppAnywhere has definitely included more and more collaboration with the open source communities that are the foundation of the cloud native ecosystem. I’d like to thank everyone that has participated in the creation of AppAnywhere and look forward to taking this conversation forward.
