The International Space Station (ISS) tips the scales at 925,000 pounds—the equivalent of about 260 Ford Mustangs and about the size of a football field—quietly orbiting above our heads in the darkness of space.
But it wasn’t always that big. The ISS first started as a single module, Zarya, weighing in at a modest 42,600 pounds (only 12 Ford Mustangs). The Zarya module gave the ISS its electrical power, storage, propulsion, and guidance and the rest of the 40 or so modules were added slowly with over 115 space flights. Each module has a specific function and can often be re-configured based on need. In fact, the original Zarya module has been reduced to a storage closet in recent years.
What does any of this have to do with apps? Apps today are built in the same way as the ISS. Instead of a single monolithic block that performs everything, apps are broken down into collaborative groups of processes that work together to provide complex functionality. The advantage of this modularization (or containerization as it’s called within software) is greater agility to deploy and scale applications.
We know that 96% of applications today have reporting or analytics functionality. Embedded analytics (or embedded BI) is a ripe service for containerization—it needs to integrate with a constellation of applications, services and data, and varying workloads require the ability to flexibly scale a whole environment. In order to have applications that interact and interoperate in the most efficient way, they should be organized like the ISS.
This is why we are happy to announce the Jaspersoft for Docker’s release. Jaspersoft for Docker lets you run the same code on any environment, alongside all of your services as a set of containers and can be scaled from a single developer’s laptop to a swarm of cloud servers.
The containers become our ISS modules, sets of those containers provide services, and those services can be deployed anywhere. It’s a good time to be alive and building apps!
Register for one of our Introducing Jaspersoft for Docker webinars to learn how this technology will change the way you build, release and deploy your embedded BI apps.
