3X Improvement in Application Delivery
What do you like best about the product?
Improvement in reliability while decreasing application delivery time
What do you dislike about the product?
We had a couple of issues during initial set up. The team promptly addressed the problems,
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
By automating application resilience with Appranix, our developers and site reliability engineers (SREs) are able to decrease application delivery times by 3x while achieving 2x reliability of our distributed AI-based system with AWS-native backup, recovery, and cross-region DR.
Cross-region application resilience and recovery in a single click
Appranix solves the basic problem of backup and recovery in the local region very similar to traditional datacenter. However, with Appranix, we are able to achieve a complete application recovery along with VPC configurations, security groups, and other networking configurations as easily as a single click for a complete business application. We feel we could use Appranix capabilities for a complete cloud region failure recovery or even for distributing production environments across to a different region in another country.
Compared to traditional disaster recovery software vendors trying to cloud wash and offer services on the cloud, Appranix is a true cloud-native disaster recovery service. Appranix doesn’t need any expensive data management infrastructure software on top of the cloud infrastructure services. A lot of new cloud users misunderstand how cloud platforms work when they move from a datacenter based operating model. For instance, a single external storage volume from a storage system could be shared among many virtual machines making it hard to protect a specific virtual machine and applications running on it. In the cloud IaaS world, a single external storage volume is attached to a single virtual machine. This fundamental change offers a unique opportunity to control how applications are protected and recovered. Appranix only uses the built-in cloud-native services to protect our cloud environments composed of our EC2 virtual machines, EBS external storage, Security groups, Load Balancers, VPCs, DHCP options, Customer Gateways, Internet Gateways, etc. Appranix automatically discovers and allows a cloud assembly creation to segment application boundaries for various tiers. You can create tier-1 business-critical applications or other tiers based on application SLOs. Appranix combines backup-as-a-service and DR-as-a-Service together for the entire cloud application environment using an environment time machine. Now, Appranix makes it much easier for our cloud operations team to provide app-centric resiliency with the capability to go back in time and recover the entire application environment in the primary region of the cloud or an alternative region to recover from any type of disruption or a disaster.
Appranix App Resilience Platform - Must have for cloud automation
What do you like best about the product?
Appranix is the first cloud service of it's kind in the market that delivers true cloud application environment level resilience. Since it is SaaS, on-boarding our AWS account and doing a quick app environment failover DR test was a breeze, quite literally with a single click of a button. There is no agent to install and no additional data management infrastructure on top of our AWS services. Appranix uses all the cloud-native services to protect our cloud environments composed of our EC2 instances, EBS volumes, Security groups, Load Balancers, and VPC configurations. Appranix automatically discovers all the services and cloud configurations automatically so you can create a composition of those services as a "Cloud Assembly". The service automatically builds an application environment time machine in the backend based on our protection policies. We have four different protection SLO templates. Now, Appranix makes it much easier for our SREs to provide complete resiliency at the application level with the capability to go back in time and recover the entire application environment in the primary region of the cloud or an alternative region to recover from any type of disruption or a disaster. You can also configure your AWS Route-53 based DNS zones so you can change over to a new failover environment literally with a button click to further reduce RTO.
What do you dislike about the product?
I really do not have anything I dislike about the service.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Prior to Appranix, true DR on AWS was not at all possible for our entire cloud environment across a different region or even within a zone. There are backup products in the market that protect and recover individual VMs. There used to be VMware SRM for VMware based datacenters. You could consider Appranix as VMware SRM Plus Plus specifically built for cloud platforms such as AWS, Google, and Azure. The fact that Appranix is a cloud service makes it very easy to get started. We are now using for multiple use cases, for example, creating a copy of the production environment for patch testing becomes very easy. This ensures that we test all the security patches with an exact copy of production so we know we can confidently roll out those operating system or database patches.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Just make sure you create a separate security key in your AWS account for Appranix to read the meta-data of your production environment using the API.
