NuWave: supporting NonStop Innovations; the latest insights from our blog posts you just have to read!

When you think about NonStop today and about all the changes HPE has introduced in transforming NonStop to better leverage commodity components and industry standard software, the more NonStop is positioned to better participate in the bigger transformation under way within the data center. HPE refers to what is present in the data center as the enterprises’ core and in describing the core, HPE acknowledges the increased presence of private clouds along with links to public clouds, all of which HPE now includes as being part of the world of Hybrid IT, which HPE promotes as the new, most viable model for the enterprises where you will likely find the presence of one or more NonStop systems.

In two related posts to the NuWave’s NonStop Innovations Blog, NuWave Director of Sales and Business Operations, Andrew Price, addresses two very important topics when it comes to better integrating with the rest of the enterprises’ servers, platforms and solutions. These two topics are of particular interest to those enterprises running payments solutions and while not limited to payments, they attract the attention of financial institutions as perhaps nowhere else is the topic of open and in this case, open banking, attracting more attention than it is among this community.

The two topics? Microservices and APIs, including API Gateways!

In the post of July 29, 2019, NonStop Applications and Microservices Price details the value microservices provide when it comes to ensuring greater integration within the data center and highlights this value whether NonStop is a microservice consumer or provider. According to Price:

“Microservices are an architectural approach to application development – in a microservice environment the application is built as a collection of small services.  Each service has a unique and well-defined role, and normally communicates via HTTP REST APIs. Microservices can be independently deployed, upgraded, scaled and restarted, without affecting other services in the ecosystem.

“Hang on, that sounds a lot like NonStop TS/MP (Pathway to most of us) doesn’t it? Microservices are often controlled by a centralized orchestration system, controlling how the services are put together to create the larger application and its capabilities.

“NonStop as Microservice Consumer – As an example, consider a finance company located in the US that starts doing cross-border business with Canada. That organisation may setup a microservice on a platform outside the NonStop that simply converts US dollars (USD) to Canadian dollars (CAD) at today’s exchange rate.  

“NonStop as Microservice Provider – Perhaps a typical payment transaction (such as an account transfer) needs to be made available as a microservice, to allow other applications within the enterprise to access that capability … these transactions, or part-transactions, need to be accessible a microservices from elsewhere in the enterprise, meaning your NonStop needs to become a microservice provider.

“Microservices can be an excellent way to ensure that your NonStop applications continue to be used, and remain relevant, as your enterprise evolves.  There are many valuable aspects to your NonStop applications, and these should ideally be made available in whatever form your enterprise architects require.  

The comparison between microservices and TS/MP (Pathway) is valid, of course, and many arguments have arisen over the flexibility on offer with TS/MP, however when it comes to better integration with the rest of any enterprise’s data center, it’s become more palatable to talk in terms the data understands and microservices may be the key to unlocking a much bigger conversation involving NonStop. On the other hand, most enterprises will welcome the option for information to flow in both directions as increasingly, other applications running in the data center need to retrieve information from the NonStop even as it’s important for applications on NonStop to pull data from other servers.

In this post Price makes reference to the post of September 28, 2018, NonStop Applications and API Gateways -What’s the Big Deal? where Price addresses the topic if APIs and API Gateways:

“There are many reasons why NonStop applications may need to “play nice” with an API gateway.  Many NonStop installations have API gateways set up within the enterprise, and these gateways will have a list or directory of all supported enterprise services.  Developers are able to use those services as they build their applications, knowing that they are secure, and are pre-authorized for usage within that enterprise environment. 

“API gateways serve an important purpose in modern microservice environments, but for traditional NonStop applications and use cases, they can be be extremely useful, too.

“As NonStop developers within these environments, we may want to work with our enterprise API gateway in at least two different ways:

• Our NonStop applications may wish to make use of one or more services provided by the gateway.
• We may wish to make one or more of our NonStop transactions available to enterprise users via the API gateway. We may even want to break up our existing NonStop transactions into microservices.

 “Representational State Transfer, or REST, will almost always be supported by API gateways, and may be the best way for NonStop applications to interact with them. If this REST-based approach is chosen, then the NonStop applications need to be REST-enabled.  NuWave LightWave Server^TM and LightWave Client^TM are the quickest and easiest way to REST-enable NonStop applications.”

To read the complete posts, just click on the hyperlinks provided in this article or simply cut and paste the following links into your browser –

http://www.nuwavetech.com/hpe-nonstop-innovations/nonstop-applications-and-api-gateways-whats-the-big-deal

http://www.nuwavetech.com/hpe-nonstop-innovations/nonstop-applications-and-microservices

Should you like more information about what support for REST in general can mean for your enterprise and about NuWave LightWave Server^TM or LightWave Client^TM specifically, simply reach out to our team either by email or phone as we would be glad to hear from you and to provide you with answers to questions that may have arisen following the reading of these posts.

NuWave Technologies, Inc.
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