Flange Cloud™

Build a monolith. Deploy cloud native.

Flange Cloud transparently transforms and deploys a well-designed monolith application to a distributed, elastic, highly-scalable cloud-native application. Flange merely requires that your application architecture have well-placed “perforations” reflecting a modular design—which in itself is a good practice.

See the quick start and presentations for guided information. Technical information is available in the Flange Cloud section of the flange GitHub repository.

A “Perforated Monolith”

A “perforated monolith” is a single application that can be run as an independent unit, while still following good architectural principles such as separation of concerns and loose coupling. It follows the best practice of programming to interfaces, while additionally minding latency and possible error conditions at interface boundaries (“perforations”) that potentially represent distributed communication.

The term “perforation” comes from Jason Katzer in his book Learning Serverless. Although Flange was designed independently, and was already implemented as a working proof of concept without knowledge of the specific content in that book, Jason's recommendation for “perforating a monolith” nevertheless aligns precisely with the philosophy of Flange Cloud:

[A monolith application designed with a] clear separation of concerns and a well-defined and specified contract between the … components; … would be perforated for future separation when it would inevitably be required to be split out of the monolith. [emphasis added]

You can build your monolith with the patterns of microservices but without their plumbing and overhead. … Take all of the principles espoused in this book: clean separation of concerns, loosely coupled and highly independent services, and consistent interfaces. Keep these in the same monolithic app, and never compromise on these rules. The result will be a monolith that is baked to perfection and ready to be carved up later.

Learning Serverless, Chapter 2. Microservices (O'Reilly, 2020)

In this description Jason gives no indication that “splitting … the monolith” could be anything but the painful, error-prone drudgework it has always been historically. Flange changes all that! Flange allows you to keep your well-architected, perforated monolith—automatically “splitting” your monolith and deploying it transparently to the cloud as cloud-native components. Flange will add the “plumbing” as needed.

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