ROSA facilitates application development with containers for EDSN
Energie Data Services Nederland (EDSN) often chooses an innovative approach when developing new applications for the energy sector. This gives EDSN’s technology partner Technolution Spark the opportunity to put new technology into practice. One example is the recent introduction to EDSN of ROSA (Red Hat OpenShift Service on Amazon Web Services). ROSA is a new joint service offered by AWS and Red Hat that was launched in March 2021. This managed service makes application development with containers a lot easier, freeing up EDSN to focus its attention fully on developing new solutions in house.
Advantages of containers
Application development with contains has expanded greatly over the past few years. Containers are completely self-sufficient runtime environments that include working application service, libraries and all required configuration files. The portability and platform independence of containers fit perfectly in the trend toward cloud-based applications and infrastructures. Moreover, for EDSN the container concept has the advantage that it is fully consistent with the Agile/Scrum development method with its incremental application development and Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD).
When applications are built in containers, they are easy to run separately on the same infrastructure. Because developers can put containers together without great difficulty, it is also easier to functionally divide an application into several smaller applications. Such an application consists of several containers that all contain their own application service and communicate with each other via APIs. The characteristics of containers not only ensure platform independence, but also give developers the space to adapt or upgrade each container as required.
OpenShift and ROSA
Containers therefore bring flexibility and scalability. The management – or orchestration – of large numbers of containers within an application (or applications) is a challenge. One of the most popular systems to orchestrate containers is Kubernetes. Red Hat’s OpenShift offers developers a managed Kubernetes environment, so that they only have to manage their applications. With ROSA, Red Hat is bringing OpenShift to the Amazon cloud (AWS) as a managed service. As Red Hat partner, Technolution Spark had the knowledge and skills to implement ROSA at EDSN within five weeks – that is a record speed for a trajectory that often requires a year.
From IaaS to PaaS
Application development at EDSN takes place largely within the AWS environment. This means ROSA is a perfect fit with EDSN’s cloud strategy. By implementing ROSA, EDSN is making the transition from Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS, the AWS cloud environment) to Platform as a Service (PaaS, ROSA). In addition to AWS’s managed infrastructure, the platform is now also managed. This means EDSN no longer has to deal with updates to and management of platform and infrastructure. ROSA gives EDSN’s DevOps teams greater opportunities to develop and manage applications in house, reducing dependence on external parties. Consequently, the organization is free to focus, together with partners like Technolution Spark, on developing new, innovative applications for its clients.
