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Exist To Help Spread Cloud-Native Revolution Across APAC at the Pivotal Summit 2019
Exist To Help Spread Cloud-Native Revolution Across APAC at the Pivotal Summit 2019 768 487 Exist Software Labs

Manila, Philippines, Nov 08, 2019 — Exist Software Labs, Inc., a global consulting and IT solutions Philippine market leader is set to join Pivotal Software, leading cloud-native platform provider, in its annual roadshow summit in two key cities in Singapore and Japan this November.

Taking place at the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore on November 14 and at Roppongi Hills in Tokyo on November 26, visitors can catch Exist at the Sponsors booth area. The team will highlight its technical and innovative expertise as an upcoming key Pivotal partner ready to help Asia-based enterprises build and operate software at startup speed.

“As a technology leader, we are committed to helping spread the use of advanced technologies that enable companies to digitally transform how they manage and deliver software and data. Our track record of designing and implementing solutions spans the Asia region and it makes perfect sense that we join Pivotal as it showcases new technologies that power enterprise-grade clouds and help developers ship code more frequently,” narrates Mike Lim, Exist president and CEO.

Spanning across five countries, the APJ Pivotal Summit 2019 gives business leaders in the Asia-Pacific and Japan region valuable facetime opportunity to meet with expert Pivotal speakers and industry thought leaders in both traditional presentation and informal conversations about the latest developments in Development and Operations (DevOps), Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), application development, cloud architectures, legacy modernization, and more.

“We marvel at Pivotal’s ambitious mission which is to transform how the world builds software and we believe that we are capable of providing end-to-end support in reaching this goal. This means that with Pivotal, we can help clients across every industry in Asia, innovate on how they use software to meet their own respective business goals as well,” Mr. Lim exclaimed.

At every summit stop, visitors and conference attendees will learn about the latest developments in DevOps, CI/CD, application development, cloud architectures, legacy modernization. Technical managers or executives looking to educate themselves will pick up the latest software development tools and methods to help transform their teams.

Business track
Learn how organizations and governments can transform the way they build and run their most important software applications leveraging a cloud-native platform, developer tools, data insights, and modern methodologies.
Technical track
Listen to speakers discuss the best cloud-native Java content from the flagship SpringOne Platform 2019 conference. Learn about both traditional monolithic and modern, cloud-native Java from the source.

“We are excited to be side-by-side with Pivotal in helping customers in Asia launch their digital transformation initiatives. With their cloud-native platform plus data tools together with our tried and tested agile methodology, we can help provide a complete solution for forward-thinking businesses who look to software for their success,” explains Mike.

You can learn more about the APJ Pivotal Summit 2019 Singapore here and APJ Pivotal Summit 2019 Japan here.

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D2iQ, Exist Team Up for First Day 2 Cloud-Native Event Manila
D2iQ, Exist Team Up for First Day 2 Cloud-Native Event Manila 768 487 Exist Software Labs

D2iQ (formerly Mesosphere), a leading provider of enterprise-grade cloud platforms that enable smarter Day 2 operations, alongside Exist, a global consulting and enterprise IT solutions leader, is set to host the first-ever “Day 2 Cloud-Native Event in Manila” on the 10th of October, Thursday, at Ascott Hotel, Bonifacio Global City, Taguig.

Upholding the theme “Driving Business Success through Cloud-Native Architecture”, the event is tailored to present the benefits of cloud-native technologies and the approaches for enterprises to embrace prevailing open-source innovations while achieving long-term success. It brings a mix of keynote presentations, strategic use cases, business stories, and technical analysis from cloud-native experts of D2iQ, Exist, and Voyager Innovations. 

“We are thrilled to make history as we are about to hold the very first Day 2 Cloud-Native Event in Manila. We have been looking forward to introducing our new brand and product portfolio especially to organizations that are at the early stages of exploring cloud and container technologies,” expressed Sam Chen, APJ RVP, D2iQ.

In early August, Mesosphere has changed its name to D2iQ (Day-2-IQ), reflecting a new strategy to bring cloud capabilities to the enterprise. The D2iQ strategy includes: Ksphere, a solution category tailor-made to deliver advanced capabilities for application orchestration leveraging a foundation of Kubernetes; Datasphere, a data-centric set of solutions which are centered around requirements for building and maintaining large-scale data analytics and processing environments; and Mesosphere, a solution category rooted in providing a very mature foundation for massive application scale and reliability leveraging a Mesos and DC/OS foundation.

With this recent amendment, D2iQ also wanted to clasp every opportunity to impart the understanding of cloud-native technologies across its market. The company deems the event a great chance to tap into enterprises in the country that need professional assistance in venturing the platform, reintroducing its brand accompanied by its recalibrated strategy.

“Throughout the years, we found customers still need lots of help getting educated and supported around cloud-native technologies – from planning and selecting the right technologies, to the workload deployments, scaling up and maintenance. As one of the original cloud innovators, D2iQ has years of unmatched experience in driving some of the world’s largest cloud deployments with a focus on scalability, resilience, governance, and security. With the enterprise-grade technologies, training, services, and support across a wide spectrum of cloud-native services, we are here to help more Philippines enterprises during their cloud-native journey as a trusted partner,” D2iQ explained. 

Among the expected attendees are IT heads from some of the foremost companies in the industry within the Philippines. An interactive panel discussion rounds out the event where attendees have the opportunity to share and exchange ideas and best practices, and network with fellow tech enthusiasts.

Exist, being one of the front liners in forwarding such technology, also shared its end-goal in taking a part in initiating this event.

“The underlying idea is to leverage emerging technologies to help large enterprises accelerate their cloud-native journey. As an early go to market partner with D2iQ in the Philippines, our deep experience in open-source and cloud-native technologies combined with our Agile development process and successful cloud-native implementations is an essential part of creating a holistic cloud adoption strategy for our enterprise clients,” shared Michael Lim, president and CEO of Exist.

“We believe that engaging in cloud-native has a significant business value. We can help more innovative organizations have a smoother path in their cloud-native journey and accelerate their time to market through imparting our expertise and experience in enabling our enterprise clients to deliver cloud-native apps successfully.” Mr. Lim further affirmed.

For the participating firms to gain a better comprehension of the cloud-native architecture, some of the subjects to be discussed are the effective navigation and deployment of cloud-native strategy, familiarizing Kubernetes, and DC/OS practices.

For more information, visit https://www.d2iq.com and https://exist.com.

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Starting the 2019 Right With First MuleSoft PH Meetup
Starting the 2019 Right With First MuleSoft PH Meetup 768 487 Exist Software Labs

Technically, this is the fourth meetup already but for 2019 it’s the first one. To find out what’s the big deal about MuleSoft, we tagged along with our resident certified MuleSoft developers, ‘Muleys’ to attend the Manila MuleSoft first meetup (Journey to Success with Mule) for 2019.  Here’s what we learned and discovered.

1. Pursuing digital transformation?  API integration is life.

Any business that runs some kind of software is more or less using more than one type already. Software has this snowball effect in companies that once you start to see the value of one, it will only be a matter of time before you think of getting another one and so on and so forth.  What this usually amounts to is having systems that perform for one specific task and doesn’t care about what the other software/s are helping with.

Like the human body, every company is an ecosystem that needs to function in sync with the different body parts. There is a need to connect and integrate the parts, most especially software, in order to optimize how the whole entity performs.  And Application Programming Interface (API) just makes integration between systems easier.  It’s an integral part of what digital transformation of companies is all about.

2. Pay big attention to using Microservices

The first topic discussed during the meetup was the importance of using microservices. And for good reason.

Think of it this way, while the use of APIs ultimately holds most applications together as required by enterprises, microservices is the way enterprises can build applications rapidly which in turn create new services.

Without getting to specifics, microservices is like creating applications using Lego blocks while traditional applications are single slabs of concrete.  If I were in the right frame of mind, I’d be leaning towards using microservices. Anyway, you can read more about them Microservices.

3. Software development without actual coding (again)

Will there come a time when this actually becomes the reality?  Probably, because this has been a constant tech trend (even though a lot will probably be just hype).  This time it is RAML which stands for Restful API Modeling Language – for managing the entire API lifecycle from design to sharing.  What’s even cooler is their Creative Laziness Whoa! and I’ll leave you to discover this for yourself.

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Here’s the deck used during the meetup:

Overall, the MuleSoft meetup is as good as meetups can be.  It started on time. There’s plenty of food and drinks and the hosts, WhiteSky Labs, did a great job at making sure that the presentations are not just informative but entertaining as well. (Loved the free blue shirt for the 1st 50 participants as well)

Looking forward to attending again. Hopefully, we get to hear more about some use cases and business values from projects leveraging MuleSoft next time.

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Cloud-Native Applications, Part 1: An Introduction
Cloud-Native Applications, Part 1: An Introduction 768 487 Exist Software Labs

This is the first post in a four-part blog series on cloud-native applications that aims to provide a better understanding of what cloud-native applications are and how to fully exploit the benefits of this new architecture.

In this introductory post, we’ll cover some of the advantages of cloud-native apps, drivers behind it and discuss some of the challenges you should be aware of when building cloud-native applications.

Many organizations are now shifting to a cloud-native approach in combination with microservices architecture and container technologies to accelerate innovation and take advantage of the higher scalability, flexibility, and speed that the technology offers.

To give us an overview about cloud-native applications, we sat down with one of our Directors of Engineering, Chris Lim, to talk about the emergence of cloud-native architecture, its benefits and challenges, and some considerations in adopting this approach.

Q. There’s a growing buzz in the past 2-3 years about Microservices, containerization of applications and Devops around Kubernetes. What is it all about? And how do Microservices and Kubernetes play in this concept?

Chris Lim: The traditional way of software application development is to have a single deployable unit that contains all the features of the application. This is also called monolithic architecture. So for example, we have created a Healthcare Information System which includes the billing, admission, nursing, pharmacy and other modules — all of these components are bundled together and deployed as a single deployable unit. This kind of architecture has its trade-offs. For one, it is relatively easier to develop as developers are dealing with a single set of source codes and popular IDEs support this. Another is that it easier to deploy and scale as we are dealing with a singular deployment unit. However, the disadvantages of monolithic architecture overshadow its advantages over the long term. A large code base is not easy to maintain and intimidates developers. Introducing a code change may introduce bugs on other parts of the application. Over time the size of the deployment unit grows and overloads the server. In order to fix a bug or implement an enhancement to one component means redeploying the whole application. This means some production downtime and interruption in the business operation. Depending on the size, technologies and process used, deploying an update is very time-consuming and the whole cycle will have to be repeated with every change. In systems that can’t afford a downtime such as healthcare, production deployment is a very risky business. Scalability in a monolithic application is also another area of major concern. Multiple copies of the application have to be deployed to cater to an increased transaction volume. This is not a very efficient configuration. Different application components have different resource requirements. A component may be CPU intensive and another component might be memory intensive. The total resources have to be taken into consideration in planning for server capacity. There is no way to scale components individually.

Monolithic to Microservices

Cloud-native application architecture aims to solve the limitations of the monolithic application architecture. Microservice is about designing the software such that the components are broken down into separate deployable units. Component separation is usually around functional boundaries. So going back to our Hospital Information System example, components would be the billing, admission, nursing modules. These will become separate deployable units. Imagine for a moment that there is a surge in patient admission stretching the computing resources for the admission module. In a monolithic environment, this is a big issue as probably the whole application is experiencing a slowdown at this point. In a cloud-native environment however it is a different story. Other components of the application continue to function as normal. What the operations team needs to do is to scale the admission module to 3 or 4 or 5 depending on the load. Another option is for the operations team to define an autoscale policy. Without human intervention, the system will self-heal itself. Scaling up when more resources are needed and scaling back down when demand is low.

Kubernetes serves as the platform in which the microservice components are deployed. It is responsible for the deployment, scaling, maintenance, scheduling and operation of multiple application components.

These tasks will be very tedious if performed manually. Automation tools and practices exist to streamline the process of coding, testing, integration, deployment and infrastructure management. To coin a single term for all this — DevOps. It helps to improve efficiency in the software development lifecycle.

Q: What are the advantages of cloud-native applications?

Chris Lim: One of the benefits of a cloud-native application is its scalability and flexibility — the ability to change or add new features without putting down the whole system or application and disrupting your operations.

The distributed nature of cloud-native applications provide the benefits of scalability and overall higher system availability. Because the system is distributed, cloud-native apps are more robust, highly fault-tolerant and remove the single-point-of-failure.

A cloud-native architecture enables flexible and agile development, shorter development cycles, and quicker time to deployment.

Combining agile techniques and DevOps philosophies such as continuous delivery in cloud-native patterns, you can reduce development cycles to short sprints and incorporate small, incremental changes into an application on a frequent and regular basis thus increasing your time to market while reducing your development cost.

Q: What are the challenges of cloud-native applications?

Chris Lim: Cloud-native architecture is no silver bullet. One of the challenges lies in managing the complexity of the system. Since it is distributed in nature, there is an inherent challenge in maintaining the system like handling network latency, inter-component communication, and handling multiple data store.

Since you have a lot of moving parts, another challenge is on monitoring. It is not practical to monitor each component separately so there needs to be a centralized monitoring application to monitor the whole cluster.

Challenge in troubleshooting is another one. Microservices architecture is a little more complex compared with monolithic, which makes isolating and debugging performance problems much harder.

And lastly, deploying a cloud-native app with a microservices‑architecture is also much more complex. The testing and deployment process should be robust and seamless because it is not that simple to rollback the deployed component to a previous version if something bad does get deployed.

Q: What would be the parameters enterprises should take into consideration in shifting to cloud-native architecture?

Chris Lim: From my perspective, enterprises should consider moving to microservice architecture or into cloud-native application in general if they think that they can no longer scale their business or application to the point that they are losing their business. But more than the application itself, I think it’s equally important for enterprises to consider building the capability first or getting a team with the right skills and expertise who will develop and govern the architecture.

Because embracing cloud-native applications is not just about a technological shift. It is also about a shift in an organization’s deep-rooted mindset and culture. We have to change the way we think about developing and deploying applications. It requires us to develop whole new mindsets, ways of working together, communicating with the team and practicing new design patterns.

Stay tuned for the next three parts of the series.The next post will look into how microservices and containers play together and what role container orchestration tools such as Kubernetes play in a cloud-native architecture.

About Chris Lim

Chris Lim is an engineering and technology leader with over 15 years of experience building software for the enterprise. He is passionate about empowering teams to bring innovation and build enterprise solutions that delight customers. He has a proven track record of delivering business results, successful project implementations that involve cross-functional teams and driving continuous process improvement.

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