Transform your tech stack while reducing costs
Modernizing apps with cloud application platforms
Technology adoption often follows a typical pattern
Organizations first implement new technologies to help them innovate and grow. Over time, the technologies mature and organizations start looking to consolidate so they can maximize benefits while also enhancing efficiency.
The adoption cycle might be triggered by technological advances (like the development of generative AI) or by critical business needs. Consider the adoption of remote work solutions that occurred during the pandemic: Organizations across industries rapidly implemented tools that enabled more employees to work from home, and they adopted solutions to help them shift to online sales.
Today, many of those organizations are focused on technology consolidation. They want to eliminate underutilized solutions, improve security of the solutions they are retaining, and reduce management complexity. This movement toward consolidation is not limited to technologies adopted during the pandemic. According to a recent survey by software company Quickbase, 90% of IT professionals surveyed reported that software consolidation was a priority for their organization.
Cloud application platforms can play an instrumental role for organizations in the early stages of the technology adoption cycle, when organizations are concentrating on innovation and growth. But these platforms also help organizations drive toward consolidation and centralization as they look to modernize their IT infrastructure, reduce costs, and improve efficiency.
Consolidating technologies with cloud application platforms
Technology leaders need to evaluate what workloads make sense to move and what existing technologies can be consolidated onto a cloud application platform. The use case will impact which cloud application platform is right for you.
Gartner recently released the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Application Platforms, focusing on platforms that provide managed application runtime environments with integrated capabilities to manage the lifecycle of an application. These platforms typically enable distributed application deployment and support elasticity, multi-tenancy, and self service without requiring infrastructure provisioning.
According to Gartner, the growing market for cloud application platforms reflects this growing trend toward technology consolidation. Organizations are looking to consolidate the technologies used to deploy, scale, secure, and observe applications so they can streamline the delivery of software. More than just running applications, cloud application platforms play a key role in improving engineering, boosting productivity, and increasing responsiveness to marketplace changes.
Organizations might use a cloud application platform to:
Support high-volume transactional applications that require high performance, scalability, and resilience
Adopt an API-first shared services approach to build microservices architectures
Decouple web UI/UX to create modern, interactive, and responsive user experiences
Move legacy applications to the cloud without needing to immediately rebuild
With cloud application platforms, organizations can solve a range of development and performance problems, reduce infrastructure management complexities, and eliminate the need for manual deployment configuration work.
What to look for in a cloud application platform
Building an application requires multiple primitives — from compute, storage, and database resources to media and AI services. Some cloud application platform vendors provide everything you need while others focus only on a narrow aspect, like the front end. Before choosing a cloud application platform, consider each of the building blocks it does — or does not — provide.
Compute: Application platforms offer wide-ranging choices for compute that cover a variety of front-end frameworks and programming languages. By selecting a platform that provides compute running in the cloud, you gain increased scalability and can reduce latency depending on which region code is deployed to.
Storage and databases: Storage plays a vital role in application development. Whether you are building full-stack, stateful, collaborative apps or event-driven architectures, your developers will need to store session state, key-value pairs, objects, and more.
Media: Images and video make websites more engaging, but organizations optimizing them for a wide variety of devices can take large teams and complex toolchains. Teams become less efficient when they need to hard-code multiple versions of media. Choose a platform that helps streamline that work.
AI: Organizations are racing to use and build with AI, but this urgency presents additional challenges. The tools and models available are rapidly expanding, and costs can quickly spiral out of control. The right cloud application platform should provide flexible access to AI models while helping control costs.
Consider the following 7 questions when evaluating cloud application platforms:
Do you have full agency for your own data or will you be charged egress fees for accessing it?
Do you have the freedom and flexibility to choose the technology you use without being restricted to a single vendor ecosystem?
Does your code automatically run from the most optimal location possible, not from a predetermined single region, without incremental costs?
Can everybody who needs to collaborate access the application without incremental costs?
Can you work with the front-end framework of your choice?
How much time do you need to spend configuring and maintaining infrastructure?
Do you have access to programmable and composable application services to securely deliver all of your applications at scale with high performance anywhere in the world?
Challenging the status quo
Cloudflare’s Developer Platform — which includes compute, storage and databases, media, and AI offerings — was named a challenger in the inaugural Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Application Platforms report. Being seen as a challenger to major cloud hypervisors validates the innovation and progress made in this market during a short period of time.
Organizations building new full-stack and AI applications in the cloud or refactoring existing applications look for a streamlined experience that spans from developing applications, deploying, and securing them all on a single platform. Cloudflare supports a variety of workloads and is constantly expanding what customers are able to build. In September 2024, Cloudflare introduced the Container Platform, which will soon be available to customers to assist with cloud migrations of legacy applications and expand the workloads that can be run on Cloudflare.
This article is part of a series on the latest trends and topics impacting today’s technology decision-makers.
Key takeaways
After reading this article you will be able to understand:
Why organizations are turning to cloud application platforms for IT consolidation
What key use cases benefit from cloud application platforms
How to evaluate cloud application platforms
Related resources
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Learn more about the cloud application platforms marketplace, in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Application Platforms report.