The following is the second installment in our middleware modernization series. You can read the first installment here.
If your applications no longer meet business requirements, it may be time to modernize. Legacy middleware platforms weren’t built to address the needs of modern, hybrid IT environments, but modernized middleware can support application environments that work smoothly and consistently across a highly distributed platform.
Modernizing your middleware can increase productivity, reliability, and flexibility while enabling hybrid and multi-cloud capabilities.
An Introduction to Middleware
Middleware is software that provides common services and capabilities to applications outside of what’s offered by an operating system. It functions as a hidden translation layer, enabling communication and data management between applications so information can easily be passed back and forth. Data management, application services, messaging, authentication, and API management are all commonly handled by middleware.
Middleware allows organizations to manage complexity, increase application development, and lower costs. For organizations with multi-cloud and containerized environments, middleware is a cost-effective option for developing and running applications at scale.
In development cycles, modern applications are engineered to run at scale, on-premises, and across clouds because developers need an application environment with unified, foundational capabilities. These capabilities are broken into four layers, with different tooling and benefits.
The Four Layers of Middleware
Middleware can be broken into four different layers, each with its own capabilities and benefits:
- The container layer manages the delivery aspect of application lifecycles. The container layer provides DevOps capabilities with CI/CD, container management, and service mesh capabilities.
- The runtime layer contains the execution environments for custom code. Middleware provides lightweight runtimes and frameworks for highly distributed cloud environments.
- The integration layer provides services to connect custom and purchased apps, SaaS assets through messaging, integration, and APIs to form functioning systems. The integration layer can also deliver in-memory database and data cache services, data/event streaming, and API management.
- The process automation and decision management layer adds critical intelligence, optimization, automation, and decision management. This layer streamlines and automates many of the manual processes associated with modernization.
Download our guide to learn more about middleware and start your modernization journey today.
Why Perficient
Our middleware and application modernization expertise earned us the 2020 Red Hat Application Platform Success Partner of the Year Award. As a Red Hat Premier and Apex Partner, we help drive strategic initiatives around cloud-native development, DevOps, and enterprise integration to ensure successful application modernization and cloud implementations and migrations.
We offer targeted platform as a service (PaaS) solutions for the enterprise using Red Hat OpenShift, which are founded on our best practices, methodology, and reusable frameworks to accelerate, migrate, and automate processes.
Red Hat OpenShift pushes the boundaries of what containers and Kubernetes can do for developers, driving innovation for stateful applications, serverless or event-driven applications, and machine learning. The platform integrates tightly with Jenkins and other standard continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools for security-focused application builds. Red Hat OpenShift helps you build with speed, agility, confidence, and choice so that developers can get back to doing work that matters.
