Organizations understand that they must implement a digital transformation strategy if they want to enhance competitiveness in today’s rapidly changing business landscape. To achieve this, cloud computing and DevOps are two technologies that enterprises can capitalize on. These are intelligent approaches to IT that reinforce one another and deliver long-term business value.
Exploring The Basics
Cloud and DevOps evolved in response to new business developments. To begin with, we are shifting our focus from a product economy to a service-based culture where great customer experiences define success. While businesses do create unique products, they take things to the next level by integrating them into core services. For example, a company that sells cars would include maintenance in the prices of their vehicles. This transition from products to services also has a direct impact on how we deliver software. Initially, organizations specializing in building software products offered them to customers who would manage operations. With the growing popularity of the cloud, many companies began to build and operate software as per customer requests.
Next, we have the concept of bringing infrastructure, applications, and enterprise processes together to deliver them ‘as a service’. These models offer analytics through actionable insights to improve IT delivery and customer service. For example, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) could range from anything between office software to enterprise applications and unified communications. Companies also utilize Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to provide employees with automated and scalable systems that store information. Next, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) allows users to access modern frameworks to create cloud storage systems.
Cloud and DevOps have a lot to do with all these advancements. The real value of the cloud lies in optimizing your frontline and helping you approach customer service, support, and engagement with confidence. DevOps includes measurement and monitoring which integrate aspects like application and cloud resources. Measurement and monitoring not only contribute to positive outcomes but also troubleshoot problems or apply preventive measures. The ability to implement DevOps practices along with fast resource provisioning from the cloud leads to digital transformation. Working with CSPs who combine all these services for businesses maximizes efficiency and productivity gains.
Cloud And DevOps In Business
One of the top DevOps trends for 2020 is the continued growth of cloud computing, storage, and adoption. DevOps-focused teams are shifting to the cloud to enable faster changes to production, enhance applications and infrastructure transparency, and develop more resilient infrastructure. According to RapidValue, cloud-native DevOps has a promising future as 80% of enterprise IT is expected to shift to the cloud in the coming years. Agile methodologies, CI/CD, and microservices are just some examples of tools and technologies that enhance the cloud-native model.
We can see that the cloud plays an integral role in every step of a successful DevOps operation, including:
1. Centralization
Today, the distributed nature of most enterprise systems does not complement centralized software deployment. This is where the centralized structure of cloud computing comes in. It enables DevOps automation with a single, intuitive platform for testing, deployment, and production. The solution also effectively facilitates access to application and infrastructure services that fully utilize the data storage, operating capacity, and processing resources a CSP offers. Companies not only receive modern tools and functions to improve performance and security. Apart from keeping maintenance costs low, centralized environments even support disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity during unexpected events such as COVID-19.
2. Security
Secure cloud gateways enable access to enterprise resources from virtually any place and endpoint device without compromising on network security. Consistent and predictable access also allows dynamic collaboration among employees. Although allowing users to access the corporate network from their devices appears risky, advanced cloud platforms are available with built-in security features that administrators need to ensure security.
It is a common practice to integrate DevOps and security to protect enterprise cloud workloads. Security is always a top priority when businesses develop and migrate applications as well as workloads in the cloud. DevOps teams proactively integrate the necessary tools and resources to achieve this purpose. It is a crucial undertaking in circumstances where quick deliveries and prompt responses to business requests are market standards.
Here is how you can do it. Once you clarify your security requirements and categorize them into manageable tasks, your DevOps teams can treat security as a technical feature in a release. Next, design an in-depth security validation plan that users can implement automatically as part of every release and incorporate cloud solutions to enforce security controls. This helps accelerate deployment frequency, reduce the failure rate, and improve release velocity.
3. Automation
DevOps automation is increasingly becoming cloud-centric. Many private and public CSPs support DevOps on their solutions, including continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). This integration goes beyond reducing the cost of on-premises DevOps automation resources. It offers centralized IT governance for a successful DevOps process and better economies of scale. Also, developers who engage with the process find it simpler to manage workloads centrally through the cloud instead of unifying different departments.
4. Process Improvements
Cloud technology enables companies to seamlessly build experimental test environments that help users prototype solutions without incurring expenses for physical hardware. IT specialists need not house physical servers and regularly update them if employees require them later. Also, the cloud allows IT to conduct automated testing in simulated environments that are identical to live environments. This gives DevOps professionals more time to perform the work that only humans can do. At the same time, DevOps teams are not restricted to monotonous tasks that introduce the risk of human error.
Companies can use the cloud to simplify DevOps implementation by empowering every stage of the development lifecycle. It is also possible for users to build and test applications in multiple environments through kernels and virtualization. The on-demand model of cloud technology eliminates the need for physical machines, leading to time and cost savings. Additionally, cloud computing automates new processes for a successful IT transformation. For instance, if developers have to assemble components to deliver code, configurations, or libraries, state-of-the-art automation solutions streamline the process and make it repeatable.
Implementing Cloud and DevOps
Organizations managing legacy systems that can no longer keep up with the performance, productivity, and security demands of this digital world may struggle to adapt to evolving business needs. If the answer is to adopt cloud and DevOps, then how does one do it? Does it involve making changes to an organizational chart or call for a generous investment in deploying a private cloud?
Things do not have to be complicated. Cloud and DevOps guide your approach to continuous improvement by encouraging you to ask questions about your business. For instance, is there anything you can do differently to achieve better results? What has changed since you last evaluated your IT architecture? What steps can you take to increase your ROI? These questions empower you to experiment with a cloud platform for a test environment and learn what works best for your company.
Key Takeaways
- Process improvements through cloud technology and DevOps speed up product time to market.
- Automation and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) decrease cloud complexity and system maintenance.
- Continuous cloud-based operations reduce or eliminate downtime. When applying automation, professionals can build stateless applications for high availability (HA) and failover.
- The remarkable scalability that comes with cloud computing allows companies to easily increase capacity. Together with DevOps, scalability becomes an essential component of applications because they are developed. Businesses can also reduce IT infrastructure expenses and expand international reach.
- The cloud utilizes subscription-based pricing that monitors resource consumption by examining user, application, data, and other metrics. With cloud-hosted resources, it becomes easier to keep a check on development resources and make adjustments when necessary.
Concluding Thoughts
The integration of AI, Data Science, and security into DevOps, along with a dynamic shift toward automation, define DevOps in 2020 and beyond. Using a serverless architecture where a cloud service manages the entire system, enterprises can harness the full potential of DevOps to save time, cut down costs, and ensure smooth workflows.
By working with Clouve, you receive premium tools and resources for everyday IT operations. We specialize in automated deployment technologies for DevOps, and our AI-driven agents can handle everything from system setup to management and maintenance. Our goal is to solve common business problems, deliver cost savings to your organization, and bring greater efficiency for your team.
Please get in touch with our experts to find out more.
