Flux7, A Specialist In State-Of-The-Art Solutions, Unveils A Microservices Service

Flux7 is an IT solutions provider that thrives on the cutting edge, specializing in helping businesses adopt modern IT infrastructures employing cloud-based architectures that support agile software development and deployment.

Over the last fiscal quarter, the Austin, Texas-based firm, an Amazon Web Services Premier Consulting Partner, noticed a significant spike in potential customers looking to implement microservices, a software development methodology that reduces complex apps into simple and lightweight networked processes, said its CEO, Aater Suleman.

The sudden inbound interest in a software architecture style favored by DevOps practitioners was consistent from a range of customers, from startups to large enterprises, Suleman said, although "they were all approaching microservices for different reasons."

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After building about dozen similar solutions, Flux7’s executives were certain of the trend line, and decided to capitalize with a formal offering.

On Tuesday, Flux7 debuted Microservices SmartStart, a turnkey offering available through the AWS Service Catalog that’s designed to help companies rapidly deploy and then customize cloud-native applications built from microservices.

"We’re giving them something developers can start using instantly, then operations can start modifying and customizing, based on their specific needs," Suleman said.

Microservices achieves several benefits in productivity; they allow companies to pivot faster toward market demands, development teams to collaborate more efficiently, and developers to assume distinct roles that can operate independently of each other.

Young startups that have approached Flux7 generally believe microservices will yield for them the advantage of being able to react quickly to customer demand as they develop greenfield applications, Suleman said.

The more established companies, often late-stage startups, are typically more interested in breaking down their development teams into smaller units to make it easier to incorporate new engineers as they redevelop existing monolithic applications for the cloud, he said.

Meanwhile, the enterprise customers have been worried about startups encroaching on their turf, and want to be able to scale their development efforts by working in parallel, usually on greenfield projects, according to Suleman.

Another noteworthy -- and related -- trend that Flux7 has observed over the past year is that sanctioned IT projects once again appear to outpace Shadow IT projects.

In 2015, most of Flux7's engagements were driven by software developers, Suleman said, often out of the purview of the IT department. But that dynamic has flipped this year, and now IT leaders are more often than not involved in those projects.

Developers that engage Flux7 have "usually zeroed in that microservices is best done using Docker containers, and they’re looking for the IT team to provide a solid harness in which they can run Docker in a governable fashion," Suleman said.

The microservices templates that SmartStart offers employ AWS best practices, configured to auto-scale and absorb self-healing Docker container clusters, Suleman told CRN.

And while the majority of the SmartStart implementations will be launched on AWS, customers don’t have to use Amazon’s cloud if they don't want to, he added.