Pros and Cons of Appian

Hi Shanmukha,

Thanks for sharing your views about Appian’s best suited cases. While the simplicity of the Appian platform can quickly address any enterprise application requirements, the platform is particularly designed to handle large enterprise deployments. I would like to share some resources available for guiding you into how Appian scales at large enterprise deployments, some tips and share some of the latest features such as “Parallel Evaluation of Expressions” which many of our customers leverage to take advantage of multi-core processing power up to 100 CPU processing cores and deliver best-in-class scalability and performance.

Enterprise Architecture Overview:
This page explains how Appian works as part of an enterprise solution. It includes:
An overview of the core components of the Appian suite
How Appian interacts with other software and systems in the enterprise
How these components work together to provide features for end users, application designers, and administrators

docs.appian.com/.../Enterprise_Architecture_Overview.html

Scaling Appian:
As you build more applications and add more users to your Appian installation, you might find that the sizing and scaling decisions that you made during your initial deployment no longer meet the demand that this increased load places on your system. So it's time to revisit those decisions and scale up your installation to meet this new demand. This guide will walk you through several options for doing that, including which options are best for which situations and how to know which options are most applicable to you.

docs.appian.com/.../Scaling_Appian.html

High Availability for Appian Cloud:
Appian Cloud offers the ability to run in a high-availability (HA) configuration. An HA configuration protects your Appian instance from downtime in the event of a service failure (a software component of Appian fails), a server failure (the hardware that Appian runs on fails), or an AWS availability zone failure (the data center that Appian runs in fails).
This is achieved by replicating data across three AWS availability zones.

docs.appian.com/.../High_Availability_for_Appian_Cloud.html

Parallel Evaluation of Expressions:
In order to evaluate expressions faster, Appian automatically evaluates queries in parallel. So instead of waiting for each query to evaluate one after another, independent queries will be evaluated at the same time if there are additional resources available, reducing the overall time it takes to evaluate the expression. This includes database queries, web service calls, custom plugins, and even Appian functions that query data stored within Appian.

docs.appian.com/.../Expressions.html

Optimizing Interfaces:
Interfaces can vary immensely in terms of what they do and how they do it. To optimize a particular interface, you must understand how its specific characteristics impact each phase of an interface evaluation.

docs.appian.com/.../SAIL_Performance.html

Thanks again for sharing your views. Appian is able to meet a wide variety of use cases for both small
and large enterprise needs. It is always recommend also to utilize the Appian Playbook when planning your implementation of Appian, which provides guides for the many considerations when starting a new project. This can be found under the Appian Support page in community.

community.appian.com/.../

Regards,

Arturo

Hi Shanmukha,

Thanks for sharing your views about Appian’s best suited cases. While the simplicity of the Appian platform can quickly address any enterprise application requirements, the platform is particularly designed to handle large enterprise deployments. I would like to share some resources available for guiding you into how Appian scales at large enterprise deployments, some tips and share some of the latest features such as “Parallel Evaluation of Expressions” which many of our customers leverage to take advantage of multi-core processing power up to 100 CPU processing cores and deliver best-in-class scalability and performance.

Enterprise Architecture Overview:
This page explains how Appian works as part of an enterprise solution. It includes:
An overview of the core components of the Appian suite
How Appian interacts with other software and systems in the enterprise
How these components work together to provide features for end users, application designers, and administrators

docs.appian.com/.../Enterprise_Architecture_Overview.html

Scaling Appian:
As you build more applications and add more users to your Appian installation, you might find that the sizing and scaling decisions that you made during your initial deployment no longer meet the demand that this increased load places on your system. So it's time to revisit those decisions and scale up your installation to meet this new demand. This guide will walk you through several options for doing that, including which options are best for which situations and how to know which options are most applicable to you.

docs.appian.com/.../Scaling_Appian.html

High Availability for Appian Cloud:
Appian Cloud offers the ability to run in a high-availability (HA) configuration. An HA configuration protects your Appian instance from downtime in the event of a service failure (a software component of Appian fails), a server failure (the hardware that Appian runs on fails), or an AWS availability zone failure (the data center that Appian runs in fails).
This is achieved by replicating data across three AWS availability zones.

docs.appian.com/.../High_Availability_for_Appian_Cloud.html

Parallel Evaluation of Expressions:
In order to evaluate expressions faster, Appian automatically evaluates queries in parallel. So instead of waiting for each query to evaluate one after another, independent queries will be evaluated at the same time if there are additional resources available, reducing the overall time it takes to evaluate the expression. This includes database queries, web service calls, custom plugins, and even Appian functions that query data stored within Appian.

docs.appian.com/.../Expressions.html

Optimizing Interfaces:
Interfaces can vary immensely in terms of what they do and how they do it. To optimize a particular interface, you must understand how its specific characteristics impact each phase of an interface evaluation.

docs.appian.com/.../SAIL_Performance.html

Thanks again for sharing your views. Appian is able to meet a wide variety of use cases for both small
and large enterprise needs. It is always recommend also to utilize the Appian Playbook when planning your implementation of Appian, which provides guides for the many considerations when starting a new project. This can be found under the Appian Support page in community.

community.appian.com/.../

Regards,

Arturo