The infrastructural needs of enterprises are multiplying ceaselessly in response to the technological sprawl. To keep up with it, infrastructures need to be a little more reliable, a bit more manageable and a lot faster. At the Tech Field Day Exclusive with Cisco 2022 Cisco Meraki presented the Meraki Cloud Platform that delivers speed, availability and reliability in the network through adoption of a new architecture that is designed to reduce complexity and enhance productivity.
Monolithic Architecture Has It’s Fair Share of Drawbacks
The monolithic architecture lends itself as an approach that makes development and testing of server-side applications simple with its logically modular architecture, but it’s not without its drawbacks. Size and complexity are the first in line. For one, the application size in a monolithic architecture is too big, and that adds to the complexity of understanding them. Monolith applications, owing to their size, are inflexible to quick and small changes and fixes.
For each and every update, no matter how small or big, the whole application needs to be redeployed, and continuous deployment is a pain. When the impact of a change is not well understood in an architecture, it leads to more manual testing which is a continuous distraction for the IT teams involved. Apart from that, there are also scaling difficulties that make it unsuitable in more than one way. None of that is helpful for productivity.
A Microservices Architecture Makes More Sense in the Current Context
A Microservices architecture presents the opportunity of splitting up a single monolithic applications into smaller services that are connected to each other but are essentially an application each. To a large extent, the microservices architecture simplifies the complexities that are atypical of the monolithic architecture. To begin with, it helps tackle the growing complexity issue by breaking down big applications into smaller sets of services that are not only better manageable but also a lot easier to develop and understand.
A microservices architecture is key to seamless adoption of new technologies. With it, developers are free to pick whatever technologies make most sense at the time as opposed to being limited by the choices made early on in the project.
Cisco Meraki’s cloud platform being integrated with Meraki’s entire product line embraces the microservices architecture. With the goals of making it simple, secure and intelligent, Meraki some years back moved it from its original monolithic architecture to the more modern microservices architecture.
Cisco Meraki Adopts Microservices and Containerization in Its Cloud Platform
At the recent Tech Field Day Exclusive with Cisco 2022, Bryant Chae, Director of Engineering at Cisco Meraki presented the Cisco Meraki Cloud Platform architecture. During the presentation, Chae talked extensively about the architectural evolution of the platform and the technology stack that powers it today.
The Cisco Meraki Platform is an out-of-box single management dashboard that offers holistic visibility and control of all wired and wireless Meraki networking hardware. Helping users bypass the cost and complexity issues associated with using wireless controllers, it supports a vast ecosystem and APIs. A highly elastic and flexible platform, it enables customers to integrate and scale it per their use cases.
Using containerization Cisco Meraki has enabled users of its Cloud Platform to have greater control and autonomy over their infrastructure, down to distributing memory and CPU. The Meraki Cloud Platform with features like Zero Touch provisioning, built-in tools and powerful insights helps create boundaries between teams enabling them to function independently.
In terms of agility, the microservices architecture enables users to integrate faster and contain the impacts of failures thus ramping up the overall availability and reliability of the network. Scalability too is a big feature on the Cisco Meraki Cloud Platform. The platform can be used to manage networks of any size, and can be scaled from small sites to campus size networks up to distributed networks.
Final Verdict
By no means these are the only features that the Cisco Meraki Cloud Platform has. With the adoption of microservices architecture, the Meraki Platform has met all of Meraki’s goals of improved agility and reliability, and overcome all established pain points of the earlier monolithic architecture. Rich in features, highly available and yet perfectly simple, it is a cloud platform that is worth investing in for infinitely better network experience. Get a free trial today.
Be sure to check out Cisco Meraki’s other presentations from the recent Tech Field Day Exclusive with Cisco 2022 event.
