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Application Infrastructure Management: Utopia or Reality?

Modern businesses must regularly deploy innovative applications and keep them running smoothly to stay competitive in their respective niches. Complex infrastructure can be a daunting obstacle in this journey.

The evident solution to this problem is to implement application infrastructure management tools that bring simplicity to complicated IT systems. The question remains: Are these solutions just a utopian fantasy, or could they already be a reality?

Key Takeaways:

Application infrastructure consists of servers, virtualized layers, and other components that organizations must manage to keep apps running smoothly.
The goal in managing application infrastructure is to have a centralized control plane from which to monitor, configure, and optimize the entire infrastructure stack.
Organizations operating in the Nutanix environment already have access to application infrastructure control planes through tools such as Nutanix Prism.

What Is Application Infrastructure Management?

Application infrastructure is the platform that supports the development and delivery of business software applications. This infrastructure comprises operational and computational assets that contribute to the process of designing, building, and even managing applications from the conceptual phase all the way to the point at which they serve the end-user and beyond.

Application infrastructure management, therefore, refers to the methods used to manage the entire application infrastructure stack. This includes physical layers of the stack, such as the servers, storage arrays, and physical operating systems, as well as virtualization layers and the core software application itself.

This approach to infrastructure management, which comes from the perspective of the all-important applications themselves, brings enterprise IT closer to true optimization and enables rapid deployment of infrastructure elements. Speed and quality are top priorities for business, so it stands to reason that the best infrastructure management methods will bring about maximum efficiency and control.

Modern businesses have complex needs, and IT decision-makers are constantly searching for the solution that addresses all of them. This raises the question as to whether the ability of application infrastructure management to satisfy those modern needs is realistic in today’s IT landscape or if it is still a far-off utopian dream.

The Utopia of Application Infrastructure Management

The ideal result when implementing infrastructure management from the application perspective is for the applications themselves to run smoothly and empower nonstop yet sustainable delivery of high-quality services. The utopian scenario would be one in which service providers can easily operate on a reliable and centralized management system.

The centralization of infrastructure management enables comprehensive IT documentation. When operators gain visibility over the entire infrastructure stack through a single pane of glass, it becomes easy to document and manage each layer of that stack down to the application level.

In a future when cloud native applications will predominantly exist as collections of microservices, the concept of application infrastructure management must be one that increases service success rate overall. On-the-fly configuring of application parameters from the central console and one-touch provisioning of resources are features of the ideal management platform that can contribute to such a high-success, low-failure ratio.

Uptime and reliability are just as crucial to success as speed and flexibility, though. Proper monitoring of application infrastructure components, such as servers and storage arrays, is necessary for identifying core causes of failures and ensuring reliable service. In a truly utopian infrastructure environment, business continuity would be an existing matter of fact rather than a goal to constantly chase after.

The Reality of Application Infrastructure Management

Application infrastructure management is a methodology that promises to solve many of the core issues facing IT teams and enterprise organizations as a whole. It may sound too good to be true, but the utopian concept of infrastructure management at the application level can be a reality here and now.

Nutanix Prism is an example of an infrastructure management tool that provides a single control plane from which to manage applications, hypervisors, and virtual machines, all with one-click simplicity. Prism enables visibility of an entire infrastructure and even brings self-service solutions that developers can access at any stage of the application lifecycle.

In the absence of Nutanix Prism, organizations may lack the level of granular control they need over applications, storage systems, and resource scheduling. With this application infrastructure management solution that exists today, solving the problems that come with today’s modern IT complexity is a reality.

In fact, Grand View Research reports that the global application server market size was valued at USD $20.06 billion in 2022 with a projected compound annual growth rate of 13.9% from 2023 to 2030. As a crucial component in application infrastructure, this growth trend in application servers shows the need for infrastructure management solutions and the reality that those solutions are already accommodating such growth.

The Application Infrastructure Management Utopia Is Real

For businesses struggling to overcome the greatest obstacles in modern IT, the idea that a one-click solution could exist may truly sound like an unrealistic dream. The reality is, though, that many enterprise leaders are already taking advantage of that utopia, implementing infrastructure management tools that facilitate the seamless running of even the most sophisticated applications.

Nutanix Cloud Platform offers an environment where organizations can run any application they choose in any cloud, all without the need to fret over the underlying complexity. Prism on NCP is a very real gateway into streamlined management scenarios in private, public, and hybrid cloud settings.

The answers to modern IT problems do not have to be complex. Instead, application infrastructure management represents a utopian reality in which the best solutions to complicated challenges are in fact the ones that make things simpler for developers and operators alike.

Learn more about other ways to simplify data management in the cloud.

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