Via @stratechery

Etsy;

We recently announced that we have selected Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as our cloud provider and are incredibly excited about this decision. This marks a shift for Etsy from infrastructure self-reliance to a best-in-class service provider. This shift allows us to spend less time maintaining our own infrastructure and more time on strategic features and services that make the Etsy marketplace great.

Although we use the term ‘vendor’ when referring to a cloud provider, we viewed this as much more than a simple vendor selection process. We are entering into a partnership and a long-term relationship.

Simon Wardley.

This is a very interestig article in the light of yesterday’s announcement about Google + Cisco joining forces for hybrid cloud architecture.

Masking the monolith

APIs have emerged as the de facto mechanism for exposing data from on-premises legacy systems to workloads running in a public cloud. Apigee provides the capabilities necessary to modernize the core functionality in an enterprise’s mission-critical systems and extend that functionality into the cloud. More specifically, organizations can leverage Apigee to recompose and share their monolithic legacy applications into modern, container-based architectures as services.

With Apigee, application developers are presented with clean RESTful APIs that are secured with OAuth2, the industry standard for API security. Apigee transforms RESTful API calls into a format that the legacy backend can understand. This is true even for backend systems that require integration with existing enterprise identity management and other security solutions.

Take a look at that emphasized sentence. This is a key part. Some organizations (especially those in the finance sector) have critical services that were developed 30+ years ago, and nobody dares touch them. I’ve heard horror stories about companies losing all knowledge about how they work, even going as far as having lost the source code itself. They’ll never be refactored, never be adapted to a modern microservices architecture.

But they don’t need to if you can “mask” them, expose their functionality through a comprehensive API management layer, and integrate them with more modern services that surround them. Modern systems of engagement interacting with the traditional, core systems of record, in a modern, scalable and agile manner.

And now, there’s a way to make this hybrid as well. This is a sound value proposition that we should all learn to master.  

This is what you came for.

This feels like the 12 Days of Christmas, but for data analytics.

Must read.