How to Deploy DevOps in the Cloud
Digital transformation is in the air. Digital transformation is fast becoming the main talking point on many C-suite and boardroom agendas and needs software to be delivered at a faster pace. DevOps and cloud are both essential drivers for it. While they have always worked alongside one another, enterprises are increasingly making selections to deploy DevOps in the cloud.
Building Blocks:
Perhaps this should come as no surprise. After all, we expect the worldwide public cloud services market to grow 28.5 percent in 2020 to reach $ 260.2 billion. Everything is moving towards the cloud, including DevOps, and in the next 12-18 months, there will be a sharp increase in the use of cloud platform services in application and as building blocks.
There are many factors in favor of DevOps in the cloud. Cloud platforms give APIs and services for automatic management, provisioning, configuration and monitoring of resources that aid in developing infrastructure as code for automating application delivery process. Cloud lends itself very easily to DevOps solutions and goes hand in hand.
Beyond the Clouds:
There are also several technologies that are very popular right now, that are acting as catalysts for cloud adoption. Containers help in breaking monolithic applications, to make them portable, easily organized, and orchestrated. Microservices help in creating services that are independently developed, updated, replaced, and scaled. Serverless architectures build on top of containers and microservices to eliminate the operational concerns from developers and complement DevOps goals of agility and delivering business value. Yet another is the rise in trust-based systems and policy-driven gates to provide right checks and balances in an automated and declarative manner. All these technologies on cloud lend themselves to agile development and to DevOps solutions.
When enterprise IT teams choose to deploy DevOps in the cloud, they typically consider custom application development and sometimes overlook ERP applications. There is a huge number of IoT (Internet of Things) platforms available on the cloud that also lend themselves to DevOps. And then is a plethora of choice on Big Data and Machine Learning platforms on the cloud to build intelligent applications. Not only are applications getting better on the cloud, tools for monitoring are also improving so IT teams can manage everything from physical hardware to containers and applications through the cloud.
DevOps…done a little differently:
The cloud is characterized by infrastructure-on-demand and pay-per-use models. This makes DevOps in the cloud different. For example, when developers get infrastructure or hosts for their containers, the infrastructure is modelled like any other software. When developers deploy role-based automated software configuration and provisioning, they can scale up and down applications based on the incoming traffic and workload. Developers can improve the COGS (cost of goods sold) considerably by getting cloud resources at optimal time / cost.
Benefits and Best Practices:
DevOps in the cloud utilized with Agile practices can help enterprises get products to market fast and ensure customers get faster releases with new features and updates. Engineering teams and developers update features as and when they are ready. If they are not already engaged in Shift Left, enterprise have to make this a priority because it can identify problems quickly and address them at the onset.
Lean Mean Engineering:
Automation is yet another key enabler. Enterprises will need to assess how best to increase automated testing coverage to minimize lag times and speed up releases. Simultaneously, setting up automated a CI / CD pipelines to allow faster updates and feedback loops will reap its own rewards further down the line as the business is better able to respond to market trends, feedback from customers etc. Teams deploying DevOps in the clouds will get that the need for coordination and hand-offs is reduced and many manual operations are replaced by automation leading to far more productive, lean engineering teams.
So, are you thinking to deploy DevOps in the cloud? There are numerous benefits, but enterprises should be aware of the pitfalls too as well as how to increase their cloud investment.
Pay Close Attention to…
First-of-all, tool selection can be an issue, so organizations should check ahead to avoid vendor lock-in to the cloud provider. Multi-cloud development is gathering momentum, according to Microsoft and 451 Research, nearly 1/3 of enterprises work with four or more cloud vendors. For DevOps team new to working in a cloud platform, proper resource governance is significant too. This ensures there are adequate quotas, there are no overruns on usage and that everything is easy to manage. Lastly, it is crucial to keep a close watch on security that who has access to do what actions. Organizations will need to be clear on how key management and ACLs to cloud services are carried out.
Finally, here are some tactics to make DevOps in the Cloud a success:
- Embrace the DevOps culture: this may sound obvious, but DevOps is more than a set of tools and technologies. It is a mindset and a way of working. Always maintain visibility and collaboration with teams .
- Choose the right tools: it is critical to select the right tools for getting CI / CD pipelines fully automated.
- Microservices and containers: organizations should move to microservices architectures and adopting containers where possible.
- Profile the SDLC: identify and ease the bottlenecks. By profiling the SDLC to identify manual activities and wait times, these areas can then be targeted and optimized.
- Keep it agile: Keep following agile practices to maximize the chances of a successful deployment in the cloud.
Clarity is proud to have been providing on premises and DevOps consultancy Services to the America’s and the world since 2006. Our clients are worldwide and currently using our unified communications platform. Clarity Technologies Group, LLC surpasses expectations.
Call Clarity at 800-354-4160 today or email us at [email protected]. We are partnered internationally around the globe and we are open seven days a week 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM EST/EDT. http://45.33.92.219 and https://dotmantech.com.
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