Part 1 of a two-part series
DevOps teams face intense pressure to meet today’s accelerated development cycles and consumerized expectations for quality assurance, ease of use and mobile capabilities. Over the next four years, organizations are expected to deploy four times as many applications and services as they employed in the past 40 years combined.1
To achieve this massive feat, DevOps teams must have unfettered, simple access to the infrastructure, tools and resources they need to write code—whether that is containers, microservices, orchestration tools, artificial intelligence, machine learning, or, in most circumstances, all of the above.
For DevOps teams, it’s not necessarily about choosing between private, hybrid or public cloud. In fact, the key consideration for more than 75% of enterprises deploying custom solutions over the next two years will shift from cloud platform of choice to optimization of cost, performance, best compute option and best location.2 That’s a big reason why DevOps practitioners require a consistent consumption experience while working across hybrid multicloud environments.
For IT, this means giving DevOps teams a hassle-free, simple, automated, on-demand, as-a-service path to the resources they need, when they need them. It means building a simplified framework to empower developers to get their code built in the most efficient way possible.
How do you get there from here? How do you deliver that speedy, seamless, hybrid multicloud experience to DevOps—while also taking into account the broader business requirements for cost efficiencies, reliability, performance, availability and security?
Here are the six core technologies IT must deliver to their development teams to enable a successful DevOps practice:
No. 1. Configuration management: With the right solution, you can ensure consistent environments for code to run across servers, storage, networking and software in hybrid multicloud environments. Configuration management improves efficiency by using automated processes to replace manual configuration. With tools such as Puppet, Chef and Ansible, IT can minimize the time it takes to deploy infrastructure from weeks to hours.
No. 2. Containers: The growing use of containers for enterprise applications and real-world production environments means that IT and DevOps teams must address the challenge of persistent storage. By leveraging the open source Trident technology, DevOps teams can access the on-demand persistent storage volumes they need, when they need them.
No. 3. Code and binary management: Developers must be able to easily access artifacts and build repositories locally or across multiple remote sites. They also need a universal binary repository manager for artifacts and builds in different repositories, such as Docker, Maven and Gradle. With the right solution, developers can organize all binary resources, including proprietary libraries, remote artifacts and other third-party resources.
No. 4. Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD): Developers should be able to access end-to-end automated processes to write and automatically deploy code. This reduces costs, accelerates development cycles, improves security and strengthens quality control and quality assurance.
No. 5. Cloud/platform as a service: This gets back to the earlier point: Developers don’t necessarily care where infrastructure is located as long as they have simple, fast, secure and cost-efficient access to the resources they need—whether that comes from public, private or hybrid cloud in any combination. They probably wouldn’t care if they used a cumulous cloud as long as it provided the tools to write code any time and any place. But there is a caveat: The infrastructure must be available, reliable, secure and capable of delivering the required performance and agility.
No. 6. Analytics: To ensure reliability, availability and performance, IT and DevOps teams must be able to leverage automated monitoring tools that provide visibility, insights and intelligence across the entire multicloud environment. Today’s infrastructure monitoring and management tools should have advanced collection and analytics capabilities to monitor, troubleshoot and optimize cost efficiencies. For instance, an analytics platform like NetApp Cloud Insights can reduce cloud infrastructure costs by an average of one-third, while reducing the mean time to resolution by as much as 90%.
Conclusion
DevOps teams have enough to worry about in writing code and accelerating development cycles without having to also worry about managing their own infrastructure, whether in private, public or hybrid clouds.
For IT teams, that means ensuring the infrastructure provides a true hybrid multicloud experience—one that is automated, self-service and agile—with no friction in delivering the resources developers and DevOps teams need, when and where they need them. For DevOps practitioners, that means the consumption experience is consistent across the hybrid cloud.
Please visit NetApp to find out more about how your IT team can deliver the six core technologies critical for DevOps success.
https://www.netapp.com/us/solutions/devops/index.aspx
1 “Top 10 Predictions: Competing in the Digitized Economy,” IDG, June 18, 2018
2 “IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Developer and DevOps 2019 Predictions,” IDC, Nov. 6, 2018
