What Is Application Infrastructure?

• Application Infrastructure Definition

  Application Infrastructure Definition

  All the operational and computational assets,—such as servers, storage arrays, and operating systems—required to successfully design, build, manage, and deliver an application and its services to end users are part of the application infrastructure.
• Components of application infrastructure

  Components of application infrastructure

  The technology infrastructure components needed to host a business application are mostly unique and depend on its functionality. The infrastructure components you choose should support the capabilities and demands of your application. You can either build the application infrastructure in-house or get assistance from third-party cloud vendors to manage the underlying computing hardware of your application. Some of the infrastructure components companies frequently use to build various application services include the following:

  Application server: The application server stores the main business and application logic mandatory to run or manage an application successfully. It typically operates in conjunction with the web servers and database servers to fulfill the requests and deliver services clients request. It also provides the much-needed redundancy and security you need to effectively host and manage distributed applications.

  Web server: A web server is a vital component of your application infrastructure. It allows the clients to request and access a particular hosted file using the HTTP protocol. It hosts the graphical user interface through which clients can interact with the application. Most companies employ both web servers and application servers to optimize their application performance. The web server becomes a subset of the application server in such a setup. Deployment of both servers allows the application to manage static and dynamic content requests effectively.

  Firewalls: Firewalls allow you to apply strict security controls and curb illicit access to different parts of your application infrastructure. You can employ web application firewalls (WAFs) or reverse proxies to safeguard your on-premises and cloud applications from malicious traffic and clients. These firewalls utilize predefined security policies to detect and block suspicious HTTP requests and secure your web server. Enforcing WAF security also helps you stay protected from severe application vulnerabilities, such as broken access control and cross-site scripting.

  Intrusion detection system: This is one of the standard technical controls you can apply to strengthen the security of the overall application infrastructure. An intrusion detection system frequently observes the web traffic to detect malicious patterns and prevent potential threats. It also sends timely alerts to your network admins when intruders make unauthorized attempts to access your applications.

  Storage servers: Storage servers are an essential part of the data layer of your application infrastructure. These servers store all the vital information your application needs to deliver to clients and fulfill their requests. Applications storing user data in relational tables typically utilize SQL Server instances to enable their database function. Similarly, applications storing and retrieving data from files employ file servers.
• Server application monitoring

  Server application monitoring

  Properly monitoring application infrastructure components—such as servers, containers, and storage arrays—is vital for maximizing application uptime and reliability. Determining the underlying reasons for application slowdowns, connectivity failures, and other performance issues also becomes straightforward with regular monitoring. However, with the increasing complexity of cloud-native applications, it can be challenging to detect, manage, and monitor all the infrastructure components. Determining configuration changes and their impact on different applications can also be complex for IT teams in an increasingly complex network architecture.

  For instance, an bad configuration change in a switch shared by multiple apps in your network can create performance bottlenecks. To overcome such challenges, employing automated tools for application performance monitoring (APM) can provide the visibility and control needed to stay ahead of potential problems.

  For example, APM tools can allow you to rapidly locate the hardware and software components associated with your application infrastructure. These tools help detect the interdependencies between different infrastructure components and the impact of these dependencies on the uptime and performance of your applications. Modern APM tools can also allow you to track the entire stack, from application framework and database to APIs and underlying computing hardware.

  Outlined below are some capabilities to look for in modern application performance monitoring tools:

  Rapid issue discovery and alerting: APM tools can help detect the hosts that have violated the predefined performance benchmarks affecting the performance of your applications. These tools can also send timely alerts when thresholds are violated by different infrastructure components, allowing you to troubleshoot them quickly and maximize application availability.

  Root cause analysis: Modern application monitoring tools often offer utilities—such as distributed tracing, code profiling, and expectation handling—to help you quickly identify the underlying reason for subpar application performance. Distributed tracing helps you observe the entire path traversed by a request in a distributed application. Tracking the complete transaction path helps uncover slow-running database queries, incorrect application code, and other root causes behind poor app performance. The code profiling functionality can also help you to determine the exact line of code or function in the application program causing performance bottlenecks. Additionally, exception tracking can allow you to minimize the app downtime and amplify the end-user experience by rapidly detecting the exceptions associated with a particular service.

  Server and storage monitoring: APM tools can help you track the overall health of your servers (both physical and virtual) and storage arrays associated with your application infrastructure. These tools can offer in-depth insights into different key performance indicators of your servers, such as availability, response time, and disk usage. Additionally, you can more easily detect storage hardware issues impacting your application uptime using APM tools. 

  Real-time analytics and reporting: APM tools can help correlate and analyze varied application and infrastructure metrics side by side in a unified interface, allowing you to determine the underlying reason for application errors or slowdowns. You can also configure these tools to generate custom reports for granular insights into your application and infrastructure performance.

  Log management: APM tools can help you evaluate and compare the logs related to a particular trace, so you can quickly determine the underlying reasons for application errors. Additionally, you can correlate and visualize the log data and performance metrics on a common dashboard for an extended period to determine and fix recurring issues causing application failures.