Imagine this scenario: You are a company building modern software which is a key driver of your business. To support this, you have grown your infrastructure organically over time by adding servers, storage, networks, security, virtualization software, monitoring, alerting and analytics tools. You have also added a plethora of other middleware, databases, messaging and operating systems that your developers need to build, test and deliver their applications.
Because of this unplanned organic growth, there is no consistency in the environment. You manage, maintain and operate much of this environment manually. Your various specialist teams (storage, networking, security) begin to form fiefdoms around their respective functional areas. Change becomes extremely difficult and automating across silos turns into a maintenance nightmare. You over-purchase to meet the demand and risk under-utilizing resources. Your costs spiral out of control. You are now finding it a hopeless challenge to meet the needs of your developers—which was the primary purpose of doing all of this in the first place.
Moving to a Modern Platform
A modern DevOps platform should address the requirements of both your development and IT/operations teams. It should give software development teams an easy way to consume on-demand compute, storage and networking as well as provide easy access to continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) tooling and software services that help increase their development throughput and shorten product delivery. In addition, the platform should also empower operation teams to manage, maintain and operate the entire infrastructure environment with very few people using smart software that drives automation and intelligence into the entire stack.
In short, it should have the ability to break the silos within your IT environment and between development, QA and operations teams. By doing this, you can increase the velocity of software development, improve infrastructure utilization, increase overall operational efficiency and reduce costs.
Requirements for a Cloud Infrastructure That Streamlines DevOps
There are several requirements for a modern, cloud-based DevOps platform. Let’s look at the key essentials of such a solution.
Self-service API-driven infrastructure is a fundamental requirement to enable infrastructure as code, a key attribute to enable DevOps best practice. It allows developers to write code (which can be done using their favorite programming language) and make RESTful API calls to the underlying programmable infrastructure to manage initial deployments and configurations. It also enables them to manage ongoing automated dynamic provisioning of infrastructure, auto-scaling, monitoring and alerting.
All this automation removes the confusion and error-prone manual steps for the entire application delivery process, including development, testing, staging and production deployments. This, in turn, accelerates software delivery and increases quality.
However, building such a self-service API-driven infrastructure by yourself is not easy. The key component that drives up the cost is the operational complexity and the cost of experts needed to build and operate it.
Smart software that drives intelligence into the stack. Very few solutions in the market automatically handle the full life cycle (deployment, upgrades, monitoring, alerting and ongoing resource management) of infrastructure and also allow seamless migration of workloads between private environments and public clouds. Additionally, if self-service is available as a SaaS-based delivery model, it is easy to add more features and workflows very quickly without having IT perform a major upgrade. If your solution comes with an on-premises install, ask how much work IT has to do to maintain this environment and how often new features will get added.
Hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI): Eliminating silos in the infrastructure. As mentioned earlier, silos impede velocity because they lead to complexity of operations, lack of consistency in the environment and lack of automation. A hyper-converged cloud design with a software-centric architecture tightly integrates compute, storage, networking and virtualization resources and other technologies from scratch in a commodity hardware box supported by a single vendor. This approach eliminates silos and lowers costs and complexity. It also makes it easy to start small and grow on demand while staying tightly right-sized on capacity and cost.
A built-in browse-able categorized application store. DevOps engineers need readily accessible CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, Git, Maven or JUnit to automate the development and test pipelines. Additionally, tools such as Ansible, Puppet and Chef help with automated configuration and lifecycle management of workloads. Application developers need to quickly integrate and deploy middleware services such as RabbitMQ, Redis or storage back-ends including MySQL, Postgres, Cassandra or MongoDB. Single-click deployment of such services and other complex multitier network tools and applications greatly automates, accelerates and simplifies the development process.
Seamless migration between private and public clouds. Developers and testers often need much greater capacity than is available on-premises for scale testing, and they should be able to move their application to a public cloud for such purposes. Alternatively, they may already have some applications running on a public cloud and they may want to bring them back to their private cloud for cost savings or better performance. For these use cases, a private cloud solution should offer seamless bi-directional migration between the public cloud and the private cloud.
Dashboards and visibility for troubleshooting. One of the key advantages for a private cloud is that you can get complete visibility across the infrastructure and applications. In a public cloud, you can only get VM-level stats but have no control or visibility below that. Make sure that your private cloud solution can provide visibility to developers directly. Many vendors only provide access to IT, thereby controlling what developers can do and making IT a bottleneck in the application development and deployment process.
Better insights to improve efficiency and capacity management. A cloud requires capacity planning, utilization monitoring, right-sizing of workloads and detecting zombie VMs and unused resources. Look for a solution that comes with built-in analytics, management tools and insights. An even better approach would be having a solution where you don’t have to install the management tool on-premises so that it can deliver its value as a service.
To meet the needs of application developers and development frameworks and to create an efficient DevOps platform, companies should look at consistent converged architectures managed via smart software. This empowers application developers and operations teams to leverage a consumption model they want, while providing control to IT and making them relevant to your business success.
Integrated intelligence and insights delivered as a service ensure that you never have to use spreadsheets to decide what to purchase and when. Cloud solutions with smart software ensure that you never have to make a Level 1 support call again; your management software can do that for you.
About the Author / Kamesh Pemmaraju
Kamesh Pemmaraju leads product management, product marketing, and technology partnerships at ZeroStack. Kamesh is a seasoned product management/marketing leader with a strong engineering and consulting background. In his most recent product roles at Mirantis and Dell, he focused on delivering private and hybrid cloud solutions to enterprises. He holds a Master of Science in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Science. Connect with him on LinkedIn and Twitter.
