Replace Java EE With Cloud-Native, Reactive Systems For Faster ROI
Markus EiseleDirector Developer Advocacy, Lightbend, Inc.
Distributed, Reactive Systems Unlock Higher Cloud ROI
Akka has consistently allowed us to cut 80% of infrastructure, or increase overall application performance by 5x, when compared to the traditional systems we replaced.
To address the business challenges of modernization, many of the most admired brands around the globe are transforming their businesses with Lightbend, engaging billions of users every day through software that is disrupting their markets. Lightbend Platform provides scalable, high-performance microservices frameworks and streaming engines for building data-centric systems that are optimized to run on cloud-native infrastructure. Supporting both Java and Scala, Lightbend Platform includes the Akka message-driven runtime, Lagom microservice framework, Play web framework, and Scala programming language. With Lightbend, development teams can deliver highly responsive user experiences backed by a resilient, message-driven application stack.
This enables product teams to:
Focus on the business logic, not low-level protocols. Not only do developers need to be able to take advantage of multiple cores on a single machine, but at a certain point, they must also utilize clusters of machines themselves. Distributed by default and based Akka, Lagom, and Play provide managed concurrency out-of-the-box so that teams can focus on the system’s business logic rather than manually wiring together complex, low-level protocols.
Eliminate bottlenecks and single points of failure. Reactive applications are difficult to build within thread-based frameworks because there is no model for distribution/distributed communication—Reactive concepts unify distributed and local communication (concurrency) into a single programming model with the same semantics (where local is just an optimization), eliminating the limitations of shared mutable state, threads, and locks. When designed incorrectly, system performance and availability suffer huge losses. Akka, Play, and Lagom employ asynchronous, non-blocking communication with a secure supervision model. This allows components to easily share work across all infrastructure resources, resulting in highly resilient, elastically scalable systems.
Realize true ROI from investing in cloud infrastructure. Shared mutable state also makes it difficult, though not impossible, to scale up and out. Ensuring thread-safety is complicated, and performance penalties associated with over-engineering for thread safety are severe. The lightweight component models in Play and Lagom are ideal for cloud and hybrid-cloud deployments, keeping infrastructure costs under control while maintaining a high level of responsiveness to serve customers.
Focus on what matters to your business. Lightbend tools and frameworks make it simple and natural to write distributed applications. They promote a decoupled architecture, which allows logical divisions of responsibility within a team and results in systems that are easier to reason on and to understand. For example, Verizon found that using Lightbend technology made their developers 20-40% more productive than when they were using WebLogic.
Enhancing customer engagement with data-driven insights
For many enterprises, using data-driven insights to deepen customer engagement over web, mobile and IoT applications is a focal point of digital transformation. Consequently, architectures are shifting from batch to streaming.
Real-time streaming and microservices architectures are unifying. The demands for availability, scalability, and resilience is forcing fast data architectures to become like microservice architectures. Conversely, successful organizations building microservices find their data needs grow with their organization. Hence, there is a unification happening between data and microservice architectures that the Lightbend Platform is uniquely capable of serving.
Case Study: Delivering 30-second personalized offers at 100x traffic peaks. At online gaming leader William Hill, personalized offers may only be valid for thirty seconds and must perform perfectly when traffic regularly spikes by 100x. READ THE STORY
Unleashing innovation to protect or capture markets
Many digital transformation initiatives at large enterprises are being sparked by either The Innovator’s Dilemma in which market leader successes and capabilities have actually become obstacles to seizing the next wave of innovation, or the Reinventors in which successful companies are using a key asset to capture a new market.
Empowering developers to innovate. Lightbend technologies make developers feel empowered by making things that used to be very hard quite easy and straightforward, allowing them to do things they didn’t dare before. Reactive Applications embrace the reality of unplanned errors and adopt a pragmatic ”Let It Crash“ philosophy using supervision and self-healing to ensure impacted components are reset to a stable state and restart upon failure.
Case Study: Real-time streaming for billions of sensors. As a recognized industry innovator, HPE is paving the path for faster, smarter data center infrastructure solutions by adding near real-time insights from billions of sensors around the globe to the InfoSight predictive analytics platform. READ THE STORY
Improving agility and time to value
In a world where business models face constant disruption, your digital transformation initiative is likely driving you to embrace speed to remain competitive. However, traditional application monoliths running on Java EE application servers were not designed with development agility in mind. With no simple development model to support modern systems, the traditional compile-build-deploy cycle for every service cripples productivity.
Work autonomously, deliver continuously. The asynchronous and message-driven foundation of Lightbend Platforms supports the design of Reactive systems, which reduce dependencies between components and enable feature teams to work autonomously and deliver continuously, accelerating time to value by 2x to 3x.
Case Study: Reducing build complexity by 40%. MoneySuperMarket Group (MSM), the holdingcompany behind three of the UK’s most popular comparison shopping sites is propagating new features700% faster, dramatically accelerating the time to revenue. READ THE STORY
Reducing compute costs while scaling elastically
Nearly every digital transformation initiative includes a cloud strategy. And, nearly every industry analyst will tell you, if you want to take advantage of the cloud, you can’t lift and shift. Your applications need to be architected for the cloud. In fact, Gartner is recommending you design every new application to be cloud-native, even if you plan to run it on-premise.
Reduce cloud infrastructure and hardware expense. Using asynchronous message passing, Lightbend Platform more densely utilizes commodity hardware compared with traditional systems bloated by locked threads. This helps businesses scale up and out effortlessly on multi-core and cloud computing architectures. Lightbend Platform handles bursty traffic with ease, without requiring hardware over-provisioning, so you can reap the financial benefits of elasticity. The added resilience and cost savings are huge.
Case study: Saving 50% on infrastructure with no downtime. After experiencing a horrific — and very public — downtime, Walmart Canada modernized its e-commerce platform, shaving 50% off infrastructure costs, and achieving unprecedented resilience. READ THE STORY
Increasing developer happiness and productivity
With your digital transformation, a tremendous amount of development lays ahead. If your developers are hamstrung by old tools, it will be nearly impossible to keep your project on track and your top talent engaged.
Making it easier, and faster, to build distributed systems. Because the actor-model is at the heart of our application development platform, it alleviates the developer from having to deal with explicit locking and thread management, making it easier to write correct concurrent, parallel and distributed systems.
Case Study: Boosting deployment frequency by 400%. A modern Reactive development model that emphasizes proper service isolation has allowed developers at Norwegian Cruise Lines to continually roll out new features and bug fixes and deploy 400% more frequently. READ THE STORY
The Days Of Java EE Monoliths Are Ending
After almost two decades of building Java EE monoliths that are slow to evolve, complicated to release, and expensive to maintain, modern enterprises are looking to new system architectures for running their business. The centralized Java EE middleware approach became ill-suited to the always-on, real-time nature of cloud computing. To achieve the full business benefits offered by the cloud, today’s systems must be lean, flexible, and Reactive.
This is where we can help. Lightbend helps developers create real-time streaming applications that are responsive, resilient, flexible, and message-driven, providing the perfect architecture for creating powerful, adaptable applications that thrive in the cloud.
