What is an application platform?

An application platform is an integrated set of tools and services for testing, deploying, and managing software (applications). Unlike application development tools that support only the testing phase, an application platform provides tools to consistently manage software through its entire lifecycle. 

The application platform comprises the various components developers need to develop and run both applications and AI. This includes infrastructure management to support scalability, continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) tools, monitoring tools, service mesh, application programming interfaces (APIs), GitOps, runtime and deployment, security tools, and more. 

Your application platform should create consistency across environments. Consistency ensures your application looks and feels the same in development and testing through to production—whether you deploy in a cloud, at the edge, on premise, or all 3. It should be unified—with a unified control set, control plane, and observability, so you can maintain visibility and control from 1 central toolset. It should deliver applications to multiple locations and provide the same experience when building, developing, securing, deploying, and managing those applications regardless of the environment.

Accelerate app development with Red Hat OpenShift

An application platform serves as the connective tissue between various phases of the application lifecycle. It lets engineers streamline application development, deployment, and operations. Application platforms provide an abstraction layer for complex applications, which allows developers to focus on code rather than infrastructure, thus increasing productivity.

There are many possibilities for building, running, and maintaining applications. Conventional methods with multiple, sprawling tools introduce complexity and stifle innovation. An integrated application platform that offers flexibility, scalability, continuous development, and built-in security supports developers in rapidly delivering new ideas and enhancing customer experiences.

Benefits of using an application platform include the ability to:

• Accelerate. Application platforms let developers simplify operations using prebuilt services and automated infrastructure management, reducing the time required to develop and deploy new applications. It lets teams choose from a variety of integrated tools without sacrificing visibility requirements and integrates a consistent approach to compliance and security, regardless of where applications or AI are deployed. 
• Scale. Application platforms let developers work with containers and virtual machines (VMs)—and scale as needed and where needed—whether on premise, in the cloud, or at the edge. An effective application platform should include autoscaling features that automatically adjust compute resource usage as the business demands.
• Manage. Application platforms offer greater flexibility with automated infrastructure management and reduce operational complexity, creating consistent functionality and deployment across diverse environments. 

An effective application platform creates consistency across environments and throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC). It supports integrations with tools for developer, security, and operations teams and provides transparency into how those tools are used. It establishes and enforces security standards and policy management throughout the SDLC and regardless of where applications are deployed. 

Whether you build it yourself, use a cloud vendor, or use a turnkey solution, your application platform will need to provide security, scalability, resilience, and auditability. Application platforms include tools and integrations to help accelerate software development while managing security, auditing and compliance certifications, observability, management, and logging and monitoring. 

Observability and monitoring

Operations and security teams need insight into application health and performance, and application platforms typically include observability tools that gather information through logging, tracing, and metrics collection. Monitoring system performance in real time helps teams identify issues and resolve them before they impact customers. 

Security controls

Security is a priority at every stage of an application’s lifecycle. An application platform requires automated and consistent security guardrails for developers, including identity and access management, network security features, and data encryption capabilities. 

Runtime and deployment

Application platforms include the core runtime environment that houses live applications. These environments use containerization for consistency across environments, provision compute resources, manage application scaling, and ensure application availability. 

CI/CD

CI/CD tools let you integrate updates and changes to code and respond to user feedback and business changes frequently and effectively. CI/CD pipelines improve software delivery throughout the SDLC via automation. By automating CI/CD throughout development, testing, production, and monitoring phases of the SDLC, application platforms help teams develop higher quality code faster and more securely.

Service mesh

Applications rely on services that communicate with each other. Application platforms include service mesh, which is a dedicated infrastructure layer that handles communication, traffic routing, security, observability, and resiliency functions among services.

GitOps

GitOps is a set of practices for managing infrastructure and application configurations to expand upon existing processes and improve the application lifecycle. An application platform should let you implement GitOps principles to create consistency across clusters and development lifecycles and consolidate application administration and management across on-premise and public cloud resources.

The types of application platforms organizations use have changed over time from rigid infrastructure to automated, integrated environments designed to ease the developer experience.

• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) deployment platforms. After software stopped being sold on physical discs and installed locally, SaaS evolved as a cloud platform model that delivers an application—and all its underlying IT infrastructure and platforms—to end users through a subscription or 1-time purchase.
• Web and mobile application platforms. When mobile devices gained popularity and the internet matured, web and mobile platforms gained traction as a collection of tools and frameworks for building and hosting web or mobile applications. They typically included storage, authentication services, notifications, and database services.
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). PaaS arose as a form of cloud computing where a third party provides the application software platform. Abstracting the operating system and hardware away from the developer, PaaS allows the user to develop, run, and manage their own applications without having to build and maintain the infrastructure or platform usually associated with the process.
• Virtualization and virtual machines (VMs). Virtualization introduced hypervisors, a software layer that lets you create multiple simulated environments or dedicated resources from a single, physical hardware system. By splitting 1 system into distinct environments (VMs) with their own central processing unit (CPU), memory, network interface, and storage, virtualization allows organizations to reduce costs and streamline operations with existing infrastructure.
• Containerized and microservices-based platforms. Containers package and isolate applications with their entire runtime environment. Microservices are a style of application architecture where a collection of independent services communicates through lightweight APIs. This shift to distributed, modular systems (rather than massive, rigid apps) allows organizations to update parts of their applications without disrupting the entire system.
• Low-code and no-code platforms. Low- and no-code platforms like Bubble or Microsoft Power Apps provide visual environments for rapid development capabilities without using coding. They use drag-and-drop components and visual interfaces that are accessible even for non-technical users.

There are many reasons why organizations might use an application platform, particularly as they expand into cloud-native development, integrate with AI applications and tools, and continue their digital transformation. 

Integration with AI

The expansion of AI tools has created a new urgency for organizations to train and deploy AI models in a range of cloud, on-premise, and edge environments. Organizations also need to collect insights and maximize the value of their AI tools, while building, training, tuning, deploying, and monitoring their AI-powered applications in production. They need consistency across environments and flexibility to integrate AI with existing systems—while creating operational consistency, optimizing access to resources, and delivering trusted experiences for developers and end users.

Cloud-native development

Cloud-native development lets you build portable, resilient applications designed specifically for cloud environments. Cloud-native application development means giving teams what they need to innovate fast, while keeping existing applications running without interruption. With flexibility to run and manage applications across environments, an application platform can help teams consistently build, test, and deploy in cloud-native environments. 

Application modernization

Application modernization projects help organizations increase efficiency and agility. By transitioning from traditional, monolithic application architectures to more modular, scalable, and cloud-native solutions, you can optimize operations and enhance user experiences. However, modernizing monolithic systems into microservices architectures requires a comprehensive set of tools for building modern, cloud-native applications. It also demands a consistent way to connect, manage, and observe applications across environments.

DevOps 

DevOps practices are instrumental in combining code, application maintenance, and application management. DevOps automates the transition from code commit to live deployment through CI/CD pipelines and automated testing. DevOps teams often spend their time maintaining existing applications, managing infrastructure, and integrating disparate tools. Application platforms integrate development and operations so teams can innovate their applications with speed while maintaining stability.

The right platform will provide the consistency, security, and flexibility needed to modernize existing applications, develop new cloud-native applications, and deliver all applications at scale across infrastructures, without locking you into a specific public cloud or technology.

Red Hat® OpenShift® is a comprehensive application platform that lets you develop, modernize, and deploy applications at scale. Based on open source standards, Red Hat OpenShift helps organizations build, accelerate, and scale both traditional and AI-powered workloads with built-in security and compliance features. It brings together tools and services that streamline the entire application lifecycle, from code development to delivery to managing application workloads across hybrid environments. 

Red Hat OpenShift lets you innovate faster and simplify AI adoption with a comprehensive set of tools on your choice of infrastructure. It removes the burden of navigating and managing disparate tools and the resulting interoperability and portability challenges that arise. 

Red Hat OpenShift Operators let you add and manage both Red Hat and certified third-party technologies from the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog—including databases and observability tools—directly in the Red Hat OpenShift console. Choose from a variety of integrated tools, fully supported and maintained by Red Hat, that address observability, networking, pipelines, GitOps, security, virtualization, and more. Choose the tools you prefer, and Red Hat takes care of compatibility and integration into Red Hat OpenShift. 

Run applications across your choice of infrastructure—cloud, datacenter, or at the edge. For organizations that want to offload the overhead and responsibility of infrastructure management, Red Hat OpenShift cloud services offer preconfigured tools, automated monitoring, single-click deployment, lifecycle management, and self-healing systems that allow you to focus on deploying applications from Day 1. 

Regardless of how you opt to implement Red Hat OpenShift or where you choose to deploy it, you can expect a consistent management experience with reliable and security-focused application deployment.