The opportunities for application developers to address new market opportunities has never been greater. But selecting the technologies to use to create those applications, particularly when building a digital business platform, has never been more difficult, writes Wikibon Cloud Analyst Brian Gracely. He provides a framework for making the critical high-level decisions that will guide the actual coding. This, he says, should be guided by the goal of the project, such as cost reduction and licensing agility or creating new customer experiences.

It starts with three tasks:

• Determining the starting point or existing status of the application;
• Understanding the technology options of each application status; and
• Evaluating the basic risks and choices for each option.

He suggests that developers segment applications into three groups:

1. Existing applications that are running in a virtual machine;
2. Existing applications running on bare metal; and
3. New applications.

Each of these has its own options, which he delineates.

As IT organizations build new cloud-native applications, the number of available technology choices expands rapidly. Those need to be understood from the perspective of end-user requirements, vendor selection, procurement models, SLAs, operational models, hiring and organizational culture. Gracely discusses the trade-offs of building directly with public cloud services versus building with containers.

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