How hybrid and multi-cloud platforms are redefining the DevOps model
Earlier articles in this series (article 1; article 2; article 3; article 4; article 5) have established cloud as the need of the hour for organizations looking to establish business continuity and ease of access. There has been unequivocal agreement among key stakeholders and decision makers that cloud is indeed the way to go. In line with the fast-paced changes to cloud platforms, a DevOps strategy can go a long way to help them understand and seamlessly implement these changes in their organizations. In this article, we explore the DevOps model, the role of platforms-as-a-service and how they fit in to your robust IT infrastructure.
Understanding the importance of PaaS
Remote personnel need access to high-performing, content-rich, and scalable infrastructure to fulfill their jobs, which largely takes the shape of modern, cloud-native applications. This growing demand is driving the use of platform-as-a-service (PaaS). The need to boost the productivity of the entire DevOps chain to deliver the increased need for agile and flexible enterprises is also driving PaaS adoption.
Businesses will continue to transfer workloads and use more PaaS resources to optimize the financial benefits of these essential shifts, as the cloud facilitates many of our remote work environments, application modernization, and digitalization activities.
Gartner forecasts that software-as-a-service (SaaS) will remain the most demanding market segment, with revenues of $122.6 billion in 2021. However, application infrastructure services (PaaS) will grow at a faster rate of 28.3% (see Table 1).
The advantages of adopting DevOps on public cloud
DevOps is on the agenda of businesses and organizations in today's hybrid environment, particularly when using a hybrid or multi-cloud platform to deliver applications. Advanced systems include complex technology stacks, which take a lot of time and effort to create and configure. With cloud computing, developers now have direct access to development resources, which before would have taken months.
DevOps is on the agenda of businesses and organizations in today's hybrid environment, particularly when using a hybrid or multi-cloud platform to deliver applications.
The cloud offers simplified features for designing higher-complexity test environments as you move along the delivery pipeline.
Big companies transitioning to the cloud platform have used the following core approaches for their DevOps strategy:
- Cloud-based collaboration tools, DevOps toolchains and distributed version control systems
- Design, run and manage applications using self-service cloud platforms, and all products to have built-in security, compliance, and performance measures
- An everything-as-code model, in which networks, compute infrastructure, security policies, create and release pipelines, and other systems are written as code and stored in a source code repository.
How different platforms are enabling faster DevOps adoption
Microsoft Azure
Across the entire DevOps workflow, Azure integrates with common open source and third-party software and services, helping organizations spend less time integrating and more time delivering higher-quality, faster apps. Using Azure Pipelines or deploying directly to the Azure platform from your favorite Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) app enables you to provision for and manage Azure infrastructure directly from third-party apps such as Ansible, Chef, Puppet and Terraform, in addition to using Azure Resource Manager for infrastructure as code (IAC).
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
AWS provides a variety of flexible services to help companies build and distribute products more effectively and efficiently by combining AWS and DevOps practices. The AWS Developer Tools allow you to securely store and version your application's source code, as well as create, test and deploy it to AWS or an on-premises environment.
You can use AWS CodePipeline to construct a continuous integration or continuous delivery workflow that includes AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeDeploy, and other tools, or you can use each service individually. Some examples of DevOps toolchain services are the AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeDeploy and AWS CodeStar.
Google Cloud Platform
Google has Cloud Build as its fully managed CI/CD service that enables DevOps to build, test, and deploy applications more quickly. Cloud Build can import source code from Cloud Storage, Cloud Source Repositories, GitHub, or Bitbucket, run a build according to your instructions, and create objects like Docker containers or Java archives. Artifact Registry is another service that offers a central location for managing packages and Docker container files. Google Cloud Source Repositories are private, full-featured Git repositories hosted on Google Cloud Platform.
Way ahead
To summarize, IT enterprises can use cloud native tooling provided by hyperscalers to handle end-to-end pipelines, which will manage workloads on-premises, in private and public clouds in combination with Anthos and Tanzu capabilities, or expand the current pipeline from on-prem to public cloud using your own tools such as Jenkins and Terraform.
Understanding different public cloud platforms and their advantages is one part of the decision before plunging into the cloud; partnering with the right implementation partner is the other.
Follow this space to find out how cloud platforms can help your organization mobilize and keep pace with this competitive and dynamically changing environment.
Read my previous blogs in this series:
Multi-cloud trends and strategy: An executive summary - Atos
Decoding the Cloud Computing timeline
Determining the right cloud platform for your business - Atos
Public cloud and the evolution of everything as-a-service - Atos
Demystifying the new wave of technology on the public cloud - Atos
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