devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Category: DevOps in the Cloud

  • Alleviating Developer Workflow Headaches by Moving to the Cloud

    Alleviating Developer Workflow Headaches by Moving to the Cloud

    Leaders in tech make one common mistake when it comes to serverless and cloud computing: They want to migrate their current environment exactly as it is to the cloud. That’s about as limiting as planning a flight path along the road network and deciding the route based on street-level traffic. You can do it, but everyone’s going to look at you like you’re crazy.

    Keeping that ‘lift and shift’ mindset prevents developers from seeing the real ROI of cloud computing and serverless technology. Instead, we have to challenge our traditional ways of thinking.

    Redefining How we Think About Software Development

    The traditional definition of software is anything that makes the hardware do what we want it to. We use operating systems to control internal functions as well as peripherals. We use application software to direct our computers to execute commands. So we tend to think of software as programmatic, needing specialized programming languages to develop. But the most popular functional programming language isn’t Erlang or Haskell or Lisp. It’s Microsoft Excel, if you can believe it, with over 750 million users.

    Every Excel spreadsheet represents someone’s software; it makes their hardware process data in a way that’s valuable to them. In a similar way, the “systems” we build on the information technology side are just more software. And cloud computing gives us a new range of powerful tools so we can build bigger systems faster than before.

    What are Cloud Computing and Serverless Computing?

    Cloud computing largely references data centers and data storage. Serverless computing is one piece of cloud computing. It lets developers create software without managing infrastructure. In the end, it increases productivity, speeds up product delivery, optimizes resources and keeps developers focused on the end product rather than infrastructure maintenance.

    Once deployed, serverless apps respond to demand, scaling up or down as needed. So when a serverless function sits idle, it costs nothing.

    Key Benefits of Cloud Computing and Serverless Computing

    There are many benefits of cloud computing and serverless frameworks. By far, the one leaders are most excited about is cost control and increased ROI. It’s also one that leaders most often miss.

    Increase ROI With Cloud Computing and Serverless

    The number-one way to increase ROI with serverless frameworks and cloud computing is to avoid building anything from scratch. Invest in open-minded research. Sometimes you need to build something yourself, but often there’s a way to shift some of the burden away from your team. 

    An easy example is functions. The first thing most developers think of when they hear “serverless” is functions. But the functions running code are just a tiny piece of the puzzle. Serverless technology allows development teams to hand off as much work as they can to cloud platforms like Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). 

    Just like someone wouldn’t buy a field, till it, plant wheat, water it, thresh the wheat into flour, bake bread and toast it to make a piece of toast, developers shouldn’t write their own code when the building blocks already exist in their cloud platform. Take, for example, Azure’s Durable Functions feature. This feature manages stateful workflows so teams don’t need to explicitly create, store and retrieve the progress through your data’s workflow in some other place. This process is so common to the systems that teams build that the cloud providers made it available without needing us to write lines of code. It’s like instant toast delivered to your door!

    The more a team can leverage already-made code, the more time they get back on their schedules and the more money goes back into the team’s budget, something we can all appreciate!

  • Aligning Cloud Spend Management With Cloud Transformation

    Aligning Cloud Spend Management With Cloud Transformation

    The cloud transformation movement is well underway, with more than half of enterprise organizations moving to a cloud-native approach this year, according to Forrester Research. Spending on cloud infrastructure is rising accordingly – more than $21 billion in Q4 2021, up 13.5% from Q4 2020, according to IDC. The cloud offers economies of scale and connectivity that companies can leverage to optimize operations, make better use of their data and identify opportunities. However, if a company’s cloud infrastructure investment isn’t well planned, they can end up spending more than expected due to unplanned access costs, applications consuming more resources than expected and underperformance caused by inefficient architecture or lack of maintenance.

    Spending governance–creating and managing a budget that supports the company’s cloud goals–also helps to maintain cloud security by ensuring that there are adequate solutions in place to prevent phishing, ransomware and other attacks that can disrupt or disable an organization’s cloud operations. Financial monitoring allows organizations to accurately evaluate the cost-efficiency of the apps in their cloud ecosystem. This can help control costs and avoid situations where different groups add their own apps without first leveraging what’s already available or correctly gauging associated cloud spend. Unchecked app proliferation in the cloud can create a cycle that includes overconsumption of resources and security issues. 

    Cloud governance can address sustainability concerns, too, as executives increasingly focus on reducing their organizations’ carbon footprint. It’s important to benchmark the organization’s on-premises servers’ carbon impact, so you can quantify how moving workloads from on-premises to the cloud impacts sustainability progress. As with spending, cloud sustainability measurement requires adequate planning, execution, organization-wide visibility, effective monitoring, and efficient use of cloud resources. 

    Planning for Effective Cloud Spend Governance

    Spending management processes have always been crucial for business, but governance of cloud initiatives is playing catch-up to technology advances and an accelerated digital transformation. We see many organizations that are relying more heavily on cloud infrastructure because of the speed it offers to deliver new products and experiences through innovation. But without financial controls, there can be an element of inefficiency that affects cloud spending decisions—something that we’ve seen as an increasing issue for companies over the past decade. 

    Whether an organization is preparing for the transition to the cloud or seeking to make existing cloud spending more visible and accountable, the financial governance aspect requires readiness. Assessing this readiness starts with cataloging the tools and expertise available in the organization to build a cloud budget, put monitoring tools in place, setting threshold levels that trigger notifications when spending exceeds certain levels and providing organizational controls to remedy any spending excesses. 

    It’s also helpful to define the goals and potential benefits of implementing better spending controls. First, no one wants to deal with unplanned costs that create budgetary problems and have a negative impact on the business. Second, spending accountability allows you to identify the internal groups that are knowledgeable enough about both cloud operations and spending management to take ownership of their role in the move to the cloud. At the same time, you can also identify the groups that need more training, guidance, and resources to get the most value and beset employee experience from their cloud transformation. Third, proper cloud governance can help companies avoid scenarios where cloud-related issues such as security, budget or over-proliferation of apps in the cloud ecosystem lead to customer experience problems. 

    All these planning requirements are more complex for organizations with an existing or planned multi-cloud environment. Because each cloud provider has its own processes and features, the organization will need to understand–and financially manage–a diverse set of tools and resources to analyze what happens across their cloud network. For example, it’s relatively simple to pull two similar reports from a single-cloud environment and synthesize them to create a summary report. When the reports are coming from two different cloud platforms, there can be format differences that make synthesis more challenging, time-consuming and costly to aggregate that data and present it in a dashboard for leaders. 

    Platform differences also mean that simply comparing previous on-premises spending to proposed cloud spending may not be a good model for accurate cost planning for multi-cloud environments. For all of these reasons as well as technical ones, multi-cloud governance often requires creating a team or task force to collaborate and share knowledge for effective technology and budgetary decision-making. 

    Cloud Spend Governance in Practice

    Like cloud technology and applications, cloud spend governance is a continually evolving practice, not a one-and-done task. That’s because proper financial visibility and management require monitoring to identify any emerging issues in terms of capacity, cost and security. For example, a manufacturer might analyze their cloud usage data and find they’re underutilizing some resources, which enables them to turn those resources off to save costs. 

    Financial governance also allows companies to find opportunities for optimization–something that can be as simple as identifying potential configuration changes that make cloud operations more efficient and secure. In the end, the promise and potential of the cloud for companies depend on smart, properly planned use of cloud resources and spending governance is a critical part of that smart planning. 

  • DevOps and Hybrid Cloud: Life in the Fast Lane, Part Two

    DevOps and Hybrid Cloud: Life in the Fast Lane, Part Two

    In the early years of cloud computing, cost savings were the major driver of adoption. These days, however, organizations are increasingly faced with spiraling expenditures, waste and a lack of control. As cloud usage bills and inefficiencies start to balloon, these challenges are beginning to undermine the benefits of migrating in the first place.

    The truth is that optimizing costs in the cloud is more taxing than many organizations first expect. Identifying cost savings that can be made isn’t generally the hard part; effectively implementing those savings is where the real challenge lies.

    A lack of control over infrastructure means that many organizations are failing to make the changes needed to truly realize these gains. So common are these challenges that there is even a word for the process to deal with them: FinOps. FinOps, at its core, is the culture and practice of creating visibility and accountability to manage cloud penetration throughout an organization, and it’s an area that is growing rapidly.

    This is the second article in my series that looks at what needs to change so that organizations can really start embracing the opportunities provided by hybrid cloud and DevOps. In this installment, I’m going to take a look at the areas of FinOps, cloud waste and automation. In doing so, I hope to show that there is indeed life in the hybrid cloud and DevOps fast lane if handled the right way.

    Get Ready for FinOps

    If you think hybrid cloud and the topics of FinOps and, more specifically, cloud waste, haven’t come up during discussions, you’ve probably been living under a rock.

    It naturally follows that the more agile an organization becomes the harder it needs to work to keep track of waste. Exponential growth is great, but without the right controls a cloud budget will disappear before there has been a chance to see any returns; there are even examples of companies migrating and then deciding to roll back—such are the concerns around lack of control and rising costs.

    Based on survey responses from over 750 cloud decision-makers, Flexera found earlier this year in its 2022 State of the Cloud Report that organizations continue to waste significant amounts of money in the cloud. A full 66% of respondents said that cloud usage is “higher than initially planned this year”, and they estimated that they are wasting 32% of their overall cloud spend. A good five years into full cloud migration and most organizations still haven’t got a handle on costs.

    The tricky part is that waste can rear its head at many stages over the course of a project, which is why it’s so important to maintain control from day one.

    Establishing a baseline of an environment that is deemed to be the known state means that what is versioned can become a source of trust and the desired state of an organization’s cloud infrastructure. How is this possible? Simple: By creating a culture and practice of visibility and accountability throughout an organization. 

    How do you do that? Yes, you guessed it: FinOps.

    Tackling Cloud Waste Head-On

    The ideal time and place to start establishing robust FinOps policies and reducing waste come when the move has been made to start embracing a dual DevOps/hybrid cloud approach. The good news is that the principles of FinOps are easy to follow and can be applied at various stages of an application management life cycle and DevOps and hybrid cloud journey.

    First, teams need to estimate financial and environmental costs ahead of deployment, something which can be particularly challenging when infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools such as Terraform, Ansible or Puppet are being used, but which is essential to successful FinOps. Once a team has decided which cloud provider they will be using, how much they plan to spend and, more generally, what criteria will be governing these decisions, effective tag management comes in.

    Tagging is the basis for achieving a structured cloud infrastructure, especially in multi-cloud environments that feature different resources being used for different purposes. Tagging means that users can add descriptive metadata (tags) to cloud infrastructure to identify key resources or values such as staging, development or production.

    In a rapidly growing cloud environment, consistent and comprehensive tag management helps to keep track of what is happening in terms of cost, usage, availability, performance and security across a constantly transforming cloud infrastructure. Once a project has been deployed, these tags need to be managed and maintained across all cloud providers, something which is critical for the management of waste, but is often a huge and messy task.

    Good tags help drive good decision-making and the more options there are for categorizing data, the better. To truly get a handle on tag management, finding a platform that can enable users to visualize and study multi-cloud costs in a central place makes it possible to establish that all-important baseline and start to reverse engineer invoices, optimize monthly costs and tackle waste head-on.

    One Cloud, One Strategy

    There was a time a few years ago that we used to hear people say this a lot: “I’ll migrate all my assets to a single cloud provider.” Cloud providers were pushing migration to a one-cloud strategy; considered completely normal at the time, but which has since been shown to be flawed, especially in the world of enterprise.

    Segregation of responsibility is perhaps the best example of why—there are simply too many responsibilities that keep a modern business afloat to risk putting all your eggs in one (cloud) basket. Consider on-premises legacy apps, sensitive data, critical workloads, the production life cycle, ongoing applications without too many peaks and even backend apps. Then consider the cloud providers, new cloud-first applications, public data, non-critical workloads, the development life cycle and frontend applications dealing with high traffic.

    Now imagine all of that suddenly disappears.

    Hybrid cloud means eggs in multiple baskets. Yes, it adds a layer of complexity, but when so much is at stake, it’s worth it. And when you have defined where you want to host everything for each application, it becomes much easier to gain clarity. The challenge is that all cloud providers have their own ecosystem, which will either be private or public.

    These ecosystems make it possible for everything to be integrated, but what is often not immediately obvious is that even though they are integrated, they are not always aligned. It’s in the interests of the cloud provider to provide the best tools to use their platform but not necessarily the best user or developer experience which is something that requires specialist expertise. That usually leads to a certain degree of lock-in as you generally cannot use their tools for managing other applications that aren’t part of the infrastructure.

    This lack of transparency and visibility into other cloud providers can get in the way and impact the ability to get the most out of a dual DevOps and hybrid cloud strategy. However, by adopting a hybrid cloud approach, teams can choose the best cloud provider for each application, putting the team in the best position possible to provide the best services possible.

    And finally, Always Consider the DevX Factor

    For DevOps to thrive, it is important for companies to stay independent both for their own sovereignty and for creating the best developer experience, or DevX (a topic I have explored in a previous article for DevOps.com).

    It’s easy to fall into the trap of using all the automation capabilities available from each cloud provider, but that locks an organization into a situation where it needs deep expertise across a wide variety of technologies. Adopting a one-cloud, one-automation strategy means that it would never be possible to migrate automation or reuse it in different application deployment processes across various clouds.

    This is where automation of configuration management, IaC, CI/CD pipelines and the DevOps and hybrid cloud platform has a significant role to play. Automation on an organization’s own terms is arguably the most critical element in the race to reduce time to market and improve quality where concepts such as shift left are adding complexity and increasing the responsibilities piled on top of developers.

    Using automation technologies to maintain autonomy and favor cross-subject expertise and team mobility gives organizations the freedom and flexibility to save time, money and roll out better DevX. Ultimately, it also helps to create the best possible environment for organizations to truly start enjoying a DevOps and hybrid cloud life in the fast lane.

  • Heat Cooks Twitter DC | AI Will Kill All Humans | Patreon Layoffs, CSAM Claim

    Heat Cooks Twitter DC | AI Will Kill All Humans | Patreon Layoffs, CSAM Claim

    Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.

    This week: Twitter is in a “non-redundant state” thanks to a hot summer, AI is likely to eliminate us, and Patreon fires 80 staff amid nasty allegations (TW: Child safety). (more…)

  • DevOps World 2022: DevOps Tail Wags the Dog of Digital Business

    DevOps World 2022: DevOps Tail Wags the Dog of Digital Business

    As a methodology for building and deploying applications faster, DevOps has been around for more than a decade. But it’s only now that the methodologies and concepts pioneered years ago are starting to wag the dog of digital business transformation.

    Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, digital business transformation has been all the rage. Organizations of all sizes now have a much deeper appreciation for digital processes that enable them to respond more adroitly to changing business conditions regardless of whether the global economy is expanding or contracting.

    DevOps Wags the Dog

    Not too long ago, ironically, business executives routinely complained that IT simply wasn’t fast enough to keep pace with the needs of the organization. At the CloudBees DevOps World 2022 conference in Orlando next month, it will be made crystal clear that businesses are now adopting concepts originally defined by DevOps pioneers to not only keep pace with the current rate of application development innovation but in many ways actually manage the business itself.

    As Mitch Ashley, principal analyst for Techstrong Research, an arm of Techstrong Group, publisher of both DevOps.com and Digital CxO, recently noted during a podcast, “It’s all about the software.”

    Of course, the shift in the relationship between IT and the business it supports has been a long time coming. The debate over how to close the divide between IT and the rest of business has been going on for decades. Even with the rise of DevOps, it’s been more than 11 years since the Jenkins continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform was officially launched. Today, advances in IT are now happening at a rate that many businesses are struggling to absorb.

    In fact, what started out as small teams of application development and deployment specialists looking for ways to automate the building and deploying of applications has now evolved into a multi-billion dollar sector of the software industry. And it is driving a level of business transformation that hasn’t been seen since PCs running word processing and spreadsheet applications arrived in the 1980s.

    Software is (Still) Eating the World

    Just how big an impact DevOps is going to have going forward is still to be seen. It’s still early days as far as pervasive adoption of DevOps best practices is concerned but, as Marc Andreessen once noted, software continues to eat the world. Today, the bulk of that software is being constructed with DevOps best practices in mind and using everything from containers to serverless computing frameworks that make it simpler than ever to add new capabilities to applications both inside and outside of the cloud. The pace at which technological innovations are being made is only going to accelerate.

    As such, it’s arguably never been more important for DevOps professionals to gather in person to share knowledge and insights. During the COVID-19 pandemic, DevOps platforms evolved tremendously. The teams that use those platforms exercise more influence than ever within their organizations. The best way to appreciate the value of DevOps has always been to learn firsthand how practitioners are employing those principles to achieve a wide range of strategic business goals.

    No matter how large or small the organization, the need to embrace and then continuously improve DevOps processes and workflows is, as always, a pressing concern. Achieving that goal in isolation may be possible, but there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind there’s nothing quite like spending a few days with a few thousand like-minded souls to make attaining those goals a whole lot easier.

    Want to learn more about this and other related topics? Join CloudBees for DevOps World 2022, held in Orlando, Florida, at the World Marriott Center. Use discount code DW22 when registering and get access to all the fantastic offerings, including keynotes, sessions, training and other interactive activities. We can’t wait to see you there for the DevOps Remix!

  • Why Object Storage is Best for Cloud-Native Apps

    Why Object Storage is Best for Cloud-Native Apps

    A crucial question that plagues cloud application developers is, “What kind of storage should we use for our app?” Unlike other choices like compute runtimes—Lambda/serverless, containers or virtual machines—data storage choice is highly sticky and makes future application improvements and migrations much harder.

    All three hyperscalers have storage services that present block, file and object-based data access. Each of these storage services are mature and offer different advantages, making the choice even harder. Though block and file-based storage has existed for multiple decades, in this article we will illustrate some key differentiators that should make object storage your default storage choice for new applications written in the cloud.

    Storage Type/Cloud Provider Google Cloud Amazon Web Services Microsoft Azure
    Block Persistent Disk Elastic Block Storage Disk Storage
    File Filestore Elastic File System Files
    Object Cloud Storage Simple Storage Service (S3) Blob Storage

    Easy Scaling

    Scalability is an important requirement for most cloud applications. It is expected that horizontally increasing the amount of compute power available to an application increases its ability to process requests, users, etc. to handle peak workload. Most cloud providers also make it easy to scale up compute resources to meet peak demand. As compute resources are scaled,
    block and file-based storage need to be mounted/attached to the new compute instances.

    However, a cursory search will show that these operations can fail or even hang indefinitely for multiple reasons. They also are often hard to debug. The other issue with using file and block storage solutions is that teardown of the compute instance may fail or hang for the same reasons. These issues immediately negate the application’s ability to scale freely as required. This is, however, not an issue with object-based storage, since there is no mount step involved. Your object storage is instantly accessible to the newly-created compute instances.

    Sharing and Consistency

    Data sharing and consistency are where object storage really shines compared to other storage types. In both block and file-based data storage, one instance of an application can end up seeing partial data written by another instance. Application developers end up having to use persistent locks to get around this issue. However, such schemes come with their own sets of challenges: Performance, correctness, etc. Persistent locks end up making an application severely complicated; I have seen even experienced storage engineers make mistakes while using persistent locks. Object storage avoids this problem by not exposing partially-written objects or objects actively being written. Also, note that objects are typically immutable, so once written they can only be overwritten as a whole and not in parts. This means updating data requires expensive read-modify-write cycles. However, most cloud providers help avoid these additional reads via special APIs that can create an object from portions of an existing object like GCS compose, Azure’s put page blob and AWS multipart upload.

    Data Protection

    Errors are bound to happen during application development or rollouts. These errors can end up impacting critical data and potentially disrupt normal application operations. This is why it is essential to have some sort of backup/snapshots configured on the storage that you use.

    Though most storage services have some form of backup/snapshot mechanism, most don’t make it very easy to configure or restore from them (that is, both require multiple steps or the involvement of a cloud administrator). All cloud object services support native data/object versioning capabilities which are extremely easy to enable. So, basically anytime an application updates and/or deletes, the object storage service preserves the older copy of the data. In case an older copy of the data needs to be restored, you can just read the old version and write it as the new object. The careful reader might see that if an application writes/deletes data often, there may be a lot of older versions of the data left behind. One might think these would be hard to identify and remove when not needed. However, all cloud providers support policy-based data life cycle management (see next section) so you can set up policies to delete unnecessary copies. Note that object versioning also provides an excellent defense against ransomware attacks.

    Policy-Based Data Life Cycle Management

    The amount of data being generated by applications is only going to keep increasing with each passing year. This is the reason all the cloud providers support policy-based data life cycle management for their object storage services. Even if you don’t expect to use more than a few gigabytes of data, policy-based life cycle management can help you keep your storage costs in
    check and can help reduce your code complexity around handling application crashes. Policy-based life cycle management especially comes in handy when you or your cloud admin decide to enable features like object versioning and object holds for data protection and compliance reasons. These policies are very simple to set up and can easily be customized to the needs of
    the individual organizations/applications/developers requirements.

    Conclusion

    As one can see from the above, object storage services have been built to enable the development of simple and scalable applications. So, if you are writing a new application from scratch, choose object-based storage to keep your applications simple and easy to maintain.

  • The Future of FinTech and the Cloud

    The Future of FinTech and the Cloud

    The integration of FinTech continues to revolutionize the way businesses interact with their consumers. What started as a viable solution to eliminating the need to carry physical currency has now become a multi-billion-dollar industry.

    Basically, FinTech is a catch-all term used to describe software, mobile applications and other integrated technologies that improve and automate traditional forms of finance for businesses and their consumers. The financial infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) focuses on enabling FinTech companies to quickly facilitate highly secure transactions among an internal network while improving user experience. The complex (yet efficient) solution helps streamline fiscal transactions while simultaneously eliminating unnecessary steps throughout the transaction process. Ultimately, making financial transactions more affordable and accessible.

    The integration of FinTech continues to bolster unprecedented growth within the business sector. The industry’s rapid growth can be attributed to a shift in consumers’ lifestyles towards more accessible and affordable solutions. As a result, FinTech has been able to solidify a prominent role within business operations, however, needs to remain vigilant in adapting infrastructures to satisfy ever-changing consumer and industry demands.

    With this goal in mind, FinTech companies have begun to innovate new solutions which include embracing the cloud within its infrastructures. With new integration, companies will have to determine whether using fintech-cloud computing entities will ultimately be an asset in achieving longevity and lucrative business growth or not. 

    FinTech Meets Cloud

    FinTech companies are rapidly turning to the cloud to provide businesses and consumers with effective solutions. According to a research study, 87% of enterprises plan to accelerate their cloud migration by 2025. So, why is cloud computing becoming imperative for FinTech companies to integrate?

    1. Agility: For businesses to compete, they must stay ahead of the competitive curve by reacting quickly to market changes. Cloud services satisfy this need by enabling companies to accelerate its scaling process. Businesses can scale their capacity up or down quickly to meet customer demand in real-time. As a result, providing a more cost-efficient solution.

    2. Competitive Advantage: Within the financial industry’s competitive landscape, it can be quite difficult for smaller companies to gain significant market share. Likewise, larger corporations struggle to retain customers as internal legacy IT practices hinder reaction rate times to changing customer demands. The cloud provides both entities with a better way to compete by offering a quicker alternative to meeting customers’ demands.

    3. Enhanced Customer Experience: Millennials and Gen Z have transformed the banking industry by starting to view finances through the lens of technology. Cloud computing offers FinTech companies the opportunity to promote enhanced customer experience with consumer-centric web applications and improved efficiency metrics. Ultimately, providing the next generation of consumers with an accessible, agile and much more manageable solution that adheres to their technology-savvy lifestyle.

    4. Cost-Effective: Businesses can incur significant infrastructure costs while developing and deploying FinTech products for a large customer base. Cloud adoption can help cut down costs by limiting usage, promoting elasticity of its products and adhering to an all-inclusive price.

    5. Amplified Security Measures: With the ecosystem of hackers and cybercriminals continuing to evolve, companies must remain proactive in mitigating the potential risk of data breaches and cyberattacks. FinTech applications with weak security measures can compromise customer data and other private information. Consequently, leaving the door open to exploitation by malicious operators. Hybrid cloud architecture provides a more secure framework by allowing companies to build their own solutions in the cloud infrastructure they own, rather than in a shared environment within a shared network. As a result, they can be proactive and help eliminate potential data security risks.

    Limitations of FinTech: Enhancing Cloud Integration

    Cloud computing integration continues to provide FinTech companies the opportunity to accelerate business growth. While there are a number of FinTech companies that have managed to achieve great success while using these infrastructures, other companies have failed.

    Any company that invests in FinTech (or any other public cloud service) is susceptible to potential disadvantages. It’s important that companies begin to identify these potential challenges and actively try to avoid them.

    Here are potential limitations to consider:

    1. Refusing to Use Existing Tools:  Change is difficult to manage. Nevertheless, it’s important that companies continue to embrace new technology as they emerge. If FinTech companies refuse to build platforms using current technology, they run the risk of an influx of user discrepancies. On the contrary, if they decide to scale up, they run the risk of hindering the agility of the entire company. By using existing and open source technology, companies can proactively fix their problems and promote continuity in their infrastructures by eliminating outdated data, obscure patches and massive inefficiencies.

    2. Ignoring Scope and Capacity: Using FinTech engineering requires an abundance of capacity planning to ensure an effective solution is created. Without planning, companies run the risk of creating infrastructures that cannot accommodate the volume of metrics used. This can result in killing dashboard performance and making troubleshooting issues impossible. It’s important to plan at every stage regardless of what providers are used.

    3. The Desire to Implement More than Required: Amid a fast-paced and competitive industry, FinTech engineers are constantly implementing new innovations to solidify their competitive advantage. It’s important companies continue to innovate and improve their products; however, operations should not stray too far from their original scope of work. Businesses should work to eliminate unnecessary additions within their projects that could result in wasting a considerable amount of time and resources. Keep simple tasks simple.  

    4. Plan and Evaluate: Businesses need flexibility, independence and a cost structure to thrive. To achieve these marks, it’s necessary for companies to take the time to plan and evaluate each offering to determine which solution accommodates their business needs. Although switching providers might seem doable, doing so can result in a more complicated and expensive solution. Setting long-term objectives before deciding on a provider could make that eventual move simpler for your team.

    The integration of FinTech and cloud computing services continues to impact the technology, finance and business sectors. The question of whether a FinTech-cloud computing structure is a more viable solution in businesses remains. By planning and evaluating each financial solution, businesses can determine which FinTech service is the most feasible for optimizing business objectives.

    FinTech companies will always continue to provide safe and seamless solutions for their customers, however, it’s the companies who can capitalize on efficiency that will rise to the top. As FinTech and cloud integration continues to revolutionize customer-brand solutions, we will become closer to unveiling the future of FinTech and the lasting impacts it has on society.

  • Exploring the Emerging Role of FinOps

    Exploring the Emerging Role of FinOps

    Cloud overspending is becoming a top-of-mind budget item for the modern CFO. To direct resource utilization in the cloud, some organizations are turning to increased automation and more diligent cloud procurement processes. As part of this momentum, new roles are emerging to oversee cloud financial operations.

    Amid rising cloud costs, FinOps is emerging as a helpful discipline. It is not always a specific role but more often a culture that blends engineers, finance and business areas to participate in dynamic cloud cost management. But getting all these players on the same page isn’t always easy — new findings say influencing developers to actually make optimizations is a top challenge.

    The FinOps Foundation recently released The State of FinOps 2022 report, a deep exploration into the role and the state of FinOps adoption across 1,000 companies worldwide. Below, I’ll highlight the key insights from the report to understand current trends and consider how organizations might implement similar tactics to better operationalize their cloud impact.

    Who Is Practicing FinOps?

    What type of person is involved in FinOps? Well, folks come from diverse backgrounds, spanning cloud financial management, IT or DevOps or consultants. Many are also new to the practice in general—the average career tenure is roughly three years. FinOps tends to be a well-paying field—45% of practitioners report salaries of over $100,000 annually.

    FinOps also tends to be associated with larger enterprises—45% of respondents came from organizations with 10,000 or more employees. In terms of industry, it is most common in financial services and IT companies, although studies show the practice is proliferating in many other sectors too. Geographically, FinOps is most adopted in primarily adopted in North America and Europe.

    Team Dynamics

    The average team size is five people, although many feel they’re a “one-person show.” Interestingly, more mature adoption tends to involve a larger team, upwards of 20+ members for established teams. There’s also a notable increase in FinOps within organizations managing between $50 million and $500 million of cloud costs.

    FinOps must interface with many levels of the company, sharing projections with both development and executive leadership. Most FinOps teams report directly to the CTO or other C-suite members. This makes sense, as an executive directive was found to be the most common way to promote a FinOps culture, followed by organic and grassroots adoption.

    Technology and Tools

    In general, FinOps tends to be achieved through cloud awareness and dedicated tooling. The most mature practitioners are “all-in on cloud.” The largest subgroup (24%) runs 1,000 to 5,000 computing instances in the public cloud, hosting technology like virtual machines, containers and serverless functions. Simply put, the average FinOps practitioner has a lot on their plate.

    In terms of tooling, there’s not one cloud cost management suite to rule them all. Teams use an average of 3.7 tools. A variance of tooling here is likely due to rising hybrid multi-cloud architectures and the need to manage costs separately within each cloud environment.

    As such, FinOps tooling includes a mixture of native cloud provider tools and other middleware. Surprisingly, after AWS Cost Explorer, the second most common tool is a homegrown tool. After that, Cloudablity, CloudHealth and Azure Cost Management rank as popular primary tools.

    Top Challenge: Collaboration

    The top barrier has to do with interdepartmental collaboration. Getting engineers to take action on cost optimization was the biggest challenge, cited by 30% of respondents. Other common challenges included accurately forecasting cloud spending (29%), convincing the organization to adopt FinOps (22%), enabling automation (20%) and reducing waste or unused resources (19%).

    Developers in the flow likely don’t want to be burdened by new cost optimization rules, so FinOps may encounter an uphill battle trying to affect low-level change. It will probably take a combination of shift-left IDE-based cost projection tooling and a decree from upper management to jumpstart this change.

    Besides getting everyone on board, FinOps is often tasked with chargeback models—48% of respondents report using chargeback to report cloud costs, the report found. Yet, correlating cloud costs to a single department or team is challenging with so much shared infrastructure. As such, shared costs remain a challenge; so much so that many practitioners don’t even split them up.

    There is also the need to resolve unexpected anomalies and increases in cloud costs, and it can be hard to distinguish between the two. As a result, 53% of respondents said it takes days for their FinOps teams to respond to unexpected cost increases. In the future, finding ways to shorten this timeframe will help save the company money.

    Next Goal: Getting Engineers to Take Action

    The vast majority (94%) of organizations are wasting money in the cloud, according to the 2022 HashiCorp State of Cloud Strategy Survey. Idle or overprovisioned resources can unnecessarily increase the cloud budget, making the need for FinOps evident. Investing in cloud optimization is also another tactic to meet sustainability pledges.

    FinOps is an emerging role that can help forecast spending and reduce waste. But the practice does require time and resources to reach an ROI. For example, a mature team only has a 5% deviation comparing forecasted spend and actual spend, whereas a less mature team can have as high as a 20% deviation. To improve, teams will require automation for evaluating and communicating cloud projections and more established anomaly management best practices.

    But above all, organizations must grapple with the number-one problem: Getting engineers to take action. Perhaps this is due to the fact that most respondents share cost data with technical teams monthly. Instead, more frequent cost transparency would match the pace of agile development and might empower more engineers.

    The State of FinOps 2022 surveyed 1,056 respondents on their FinOps roles. The yearly study is conducted by The FinOps Foundation, a Linux Foundation program. For more details, you can read the entire report here.

  • How’s Facebook Work? They Don’t Know! | Cali. Pay Law | NASA RISC-V Launch

    How’s Facebook Work? They Don’t Know! | Cali. Pay Law | NASA RISC-V Launch

    Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.

    This week: Facebook engineers admit they’ve no idea what Meta stores (or where), California requires job ads quote salaries, and RISC-V will power future NASA spacecraft. (more…)

  • How to Go Multi-Cloud: A Simple Three-Step Approach

    How to Go Multi-Cloud: A Simple Three-Step Approach

    Odds are your business already uses cloud technology for automation, cybersecurity, IT infrastructure updates and other purposes. But you don’t have to stick to a single cloud server or provider. In fact, you can take advantage of multi-cloud strategies for your organization and reap the benefits for years to come.

    That said, multi-cloud adoption and optimization can be tricky, especially if you don’t have a plan in mind from the get-go. Today, let’s break down a simplistic yet effective three-step approach to go multi-cloud without running into major problems.

    Step One: Map Your Cloud Zoning Policy

    Your first major step should be to map out your cloud zoning policy and plan. In a nutshell, the cloud zoning choices you make can impact your commitments, costs, and even the eventual functionality of the multi-cloud setup.

    By mapping out your clouds, you also map out which processes and applications will run on each individual cloud server or provider. In essence, you decide what gets locked into one cloud, what data has to be ported between clouds and what applications must run on multiple clouds simultaneously.

    Need an example? A cloud zoning policy might cover whether you keep your web surfing or data analytics on separate cloud providers or on the same cloud servers. 

    You should map your cloud zoning policy regardless of whether you do the setup or hire a service. In the latter case, offering a read-to-go zoning map will make the service’s job easier and minimize the possibility of mistakes and/or hiccups.

    How to Determine Optimal Cloud Zoning

    Naturally, figuring out how to optimize cloud zoning can be difficult. The best way to do this is to determine your special focus areas. Alternatively, consider how you want your multi-cloud strategy to best benefit your organization.

    Say that you want to guarantee 100% uptime for your customers or visitors, even if your service goes down or if you experience a data breach. In this case, you can set up your cloud zoning strategy to balance the data load across multiple clouds at the same time.

    Or say that you want to make sure your users have global availability 24/7/365. In that case, you can set your cloud zoning policies to ensure that users can access your data or websites from anywhere around the globe at any point.

    Essentially, figure out what matters most to your organization–and what you want the most from multi-cloud optimization–and zone your cloud applications and policies accordingly.

    Step Two: Architect the Multi-Cloud Environment

    The next major step is to architect your multi-cloud environment. This involves looking at the high-level design of the environment and creating a rock-solid foundation for multi-cloud servers.

    At this stage, you should have at least some idea of how your business will grow and how the multi-cloud environment will assist with its scalability and resource needs. You need to know:

    • Where your data science and machine learning applications need to be
    • Where your product application serves from
    • Where your data warehousing takes place
    • Where cloud security is run from
    • How each of those functions grows alongside the others

    In the architecture phase of a multi-cloud setup, you need to figure out which projects and apps are so-called “cloud agnostic.” Cloud agnostic projects and applications don’t have to be portable; because of this, they can lean on managed services or proprietary IT infrastructure from your organization.

    How to Set Up an Ideal Multi-Cloud Environment

    To reap the most benefits out of a multi-cloud environment, you should adopt a containerized and flexible approach. Not only is this cost advantageous, it also allows you to set up your multi-cloud environment with as much versatility as possible.

    If you architect or plan your multi-cloud environment so it is containerized and flexible, you can work with practically any infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider. Therefore, you can transition to different cloud hosts or service providers whenever necessary according to your budget or other factors.

    To do this, be sure to perform heavy forecasting. You need to know how much data storage your computing will require, the database utilization your organization will need, the number of computer nodes you’ll likely require and so on.

    As a side bonus, containerization in your multi-cloud setup means that if one server or process goes down, the others are less likely to fail from a cascade effect as well.

    Step Three: Prep for Contracts and Forecast Costs

    The last step in going multi-cloud for your organization is handling the financial aspect of the process. You need to prepare for contracts and commitments alongside forecasting costs.

    Forecasting is critical in this phase because you’ll prepare for contracts and select different cloud services. Because of this, you need to understand how flexible your budget is relative to your infrastructure requirements.

    Specifically, you’ll need to match the costs to every multi-cloud forecast and build your overall resource and money consumption budget. Basically, you need to know:

    • How much you’ll likely spend on multi-cloud processing and services
    • Whether you need certain features, such as website monitoring tools like Visualping
    • Whether your budget can take that forecasted strain

    If the answer to the third question is “no,” you may need to go with a more affordable service or adjust your multi-cloud environment architecture and zoning policies. By forecasting costs ahead of time, you won’t run into a disaster scenario where you already have your multi-caught environment up and running but can’t pay for it, forcing you to scramble as a result.

    Minimize Commitment Risk

    Luckily, there are ways to minimize commitment risk and avoid budgetary disasters. For example, you can use commitment buy-back guarantees, or you can use flexible commitment options like that from AWS. These include computing savings plans, which consume cloud resources in any region and which result in very low savings rates.

    Of course, you can and should also practice very careful budgeting and accounting. Once you ensure that your commitment costs and savings are attributed to the right services, server resources, applications, etc., you’ll have a better idea of how much money and other resources you really need and avoid over-committing to a provider that is too expensive.

    Then you can further avoid commitment risk when planning your migrations of applications between different vendors carefully. Budgetary costs can skyrocket if migrating applications and data between vendors take longer or result in unexpected complications. Therefore, you should make sure that your migrations go quickly and easily or that a cloud service provider offers assistance during this phase (possibly as part of a deal to get you to sign with them in the first place).

    Wrapping Up

    As you can see, you can transition your organization to multi-cloud in a matter of months. But even if you follow the above steps perfectly, remember that you won’t optimize your commitments, performance and costs up to 100%. Still, you can prep your organization for long-term success and multi-cloud benefits with the right preparation and planning.

    With the right cloud services provider, you’ll gain additional assistance and support throughout this process and be able to take advantage of the extra resources from a multi-cloud setup quickly and easily.