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Tag: hybrid cloud

IBM to Provide Hybrid Cloud Service Based on VMware Cloud

At the VMware Explore 2023 conference this week, IBM announced that it will soon provide a fully managed service based on a streamlined edition of VMware Cloud.

Brendan Kinkade, vice president for independent software vendors, technology and hybrid cloud partnerships for IBM Global Sales, said VMware is now making available editions of VMware Cloud that are both easier to deploy and manage and, just as importantly, migrate between cloud platforms and on-premises environments as IT teams see fit.

IBM is committed to using that platform to deliver a managed VMware Cloud service that will span hybrid cloud computing environments aligned to an NIST-validated framework, he added. That approach is critical because it will enable IT teams to apply VMware license credits to any instance of VMware Cloud no matter where it is deployed, noted Kinkade.

In addition, the streamlined edition of VMware Cloud doesn’t use proprietary application programming interfaces (APIs) to make it simpler to port IT environments to another cloud service or back to an on-premises IT environment whenever necessary, he added.

At the foundation of the hybrid cloud service will be an instance of a multi-tenant vCloud Director console residing on the IBM Cloud. Through the console, IT teams will be able to work with IBM to co-manage application environments.

In addition, IBM is providing a managed IBM Cloud Cyber Recovery (ICCR) Service to better secure cloud computing environments.

It’s not clear how much of IT is now being consumed as a managed service, but the COVID-19 pandemic has certainly increased that number. Many IT organizations are also finding it simpler to rely on a managed services provider (MSP) to manage infrastructure so they can focus more of their time and effort on application development, noted Kinkade.

MSPs are also in a better position to aggregate all the telemetry data needed to train artificial intelligence (AI) models that will be used to automate workflows, he added.

Exactly how DevOps workflows will evolve as organizations rely more on external service providers to manage IT infrastructure is, naturally, a work in progress within many organizations. The main challenge is aligning a unique set of continuous delivery (CD) practices for deploying and updating applications with a provider that has already defined its own workflows.

Nevertheless, given the complexity of those environments, many organizations are not able to hire and retain the IT expertise required to manage it, so the only option may be to rely on an MSP.

Each IT organization will need to decide whether to rely on an MSP, given the total cost of a service. Many organizations often wind up having a mix of workloads managed by internal IT teams and external service providers. The one thing that is certain is that as the pace at which workloads are being deployed in the cloud increases, many internal IT teams are overwhelmed by a level of complexity that will only increase.

August 23, 2023
DevOps Download: What to Know About Life in the Cloud(s)
According to the 2022 Flexera State of the Cloud Report, 89% of cloud customers now use multiple cloud hosting providers. Nearly nine out of 10 might sound high, but it tracks with the anecdotal evidence we’ve seen. For varied and good reasons, companies are spreading their usage across multiple hyperscalers rather than putting all their eggs in one basket.

In this article, I’ll take a look at what life in the cloud(s) looks like today. Along the way, I’ll examine the value that companies and their DevOps teams can derive from this approach, the challenges to be aware of, use cases for making the multi-cloud move and more.

What is Multi-Cloud?

Multi-cloud is a type of cloud strategy approach where an organization uses computing services from at least two cloud providers to run their applications. Instead of a single-cloud stack, these environments include two or more public or private clouds, or a combination of both. With multi-cloud, you can have an application running on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), another in Amazon Web Services (AWS), and maybe one on premise for hard-to-move applications.

There are three kinds of cloud setups. Single cloud is when workloads run solely on one environment. Hybrid cloud entails overlapping workloads across multiple clouds, such as operating the same programs on different providers for business continuity purposes. The final setup is planned multi-cloud, which disperses applications and usage across providers along specific lines, like having compute intensive applications with one provider and data analysis applications with another.

Got a Preference?

Make no mistake, using multiple cloud providers is more complex than a single host, but as its popularity shows, the benefits can carry more weight. Foremost, that’s because an organization gains the flexibility to create a best of all worlds situation, based on factors like the following:
- Operational preference: Users may like different features from different providers, and splitting types of use can yield the ideal setup. For instance, a customer may run compute on AWS but want their business intelligence and machine learning on GCP. In this deployment, the front-end app could gather the needed information, then send the data to the other provider for analysis and ML.
- Regulatory requirements: Certain workloads may require data storage in specific regions, but not all cloud vendors have multiple “regions” in each country. Companies that want to use the cloud can set up a “multi-region” environment by having one region on AWS and a second region on GCP within the same country.
- Cost savings: Cloud providers offer different savings plans. For a savvy user, structuring a flexible program can take advantage of each to significantly reduce costs. It’s also a great way to avoid the pitfalls of lock-in and can make it easier to go elsewhere should a provider lose your trust.
- Failsafe Options: Outages happen, so companies needing 24/7 access to apps will sometimes run portions redundantly on two hosts to ensure smooth operations. For example, a retail app may run on GCP and AWS with live failover between them. That way, if one goes down the other can kick in without noticeable downtime.
Not Without its Challenges

The benefits to running a multi-cloud setup are clear, but there are some challenges as well. A carefully planned multi-cloud setup can save money, but a careless approach will duplicate operations and cost. It also leaves companies vulnerable to mistakes that can lead to significant overrun, especially for hybrid cloud operations, which can be extremely complex. Specialists must be well versed in FinOps principles and experienced at writing modern applications that can scale and work across regions and clouds, to ensure success in a multicloud approach.

Coming to Terms

You’ll undoubtedly come across a lot of new ideas and terminology when researching cloud setups. Here’s a few of the more crucial ones to become familiar with as you plan strategy.
- Lift and shift: This refers to cloud-to-cloud migration, in other words, taking what you have in one cloud and putting it in another, whether it is private to public or public to public.
- Move and improve: This usually refers to migrating while making a small change to take advantage of a public cloud feature. For instance, you could be using open source Kubernetes on premise but want to move to a managed version. Eliminating management of Kubernetes would require a minor change but it improves operations greatly.
- Cloudbursting: On premise offers hard limits to capacity. For companies able to anticipate business peaks, cloudbursting can scale workloads to an on-demand public cloud for a short period. For example, a retailer who operates on premise may cloudburst on Black Friday in order to handle a volume increase.
- High Availability: The goal of this is to eliminate single points of failure by enabling users to continue working even if one of the IT components that an applications depends upon fails.
- Disaster Recovery: Clouds offer solutions to help an organization restore critical systems and data after a disaster strikes. Recovery comes in three “heat levels”: Cold is for data backup only, warm restores operations in several hours, hot is for near-instant resumption of cloud operations.
People and Processes

The most important considerations for operationalizing multi-cloud are people and processes. Providers pump out new services fast, and not only can it be difficult for staff to keep up, it can be demoralizing when they’re unable to. Allowing time to succeed, fail and learn is key, and larger companies might consider designated specialists for each platform.

When it comes to processes, management and security are highly customizable, but it requires deep knowledge to get them right. Operating via infrastructure as code rather than ClickOps is a must. The latter is a time consuming approach that requires selecting options in a provider menu and introduces both operational and security risks in the form of configuration drift.

Life in the Clouds

Multi-cloud brings strong benefits to DevOps. Organizations can get the right infrastructure balance based on their needs. Distributing workloads can reduce the impact of outages and bolster resiliency. There’s greater opportunity for cost savings, and scaling is simple. Ultimately, multi-cloud operational enhancements can result in more reliable and innovative solutions, which delivers on the mantra of DevOps itself.
August 10, 2023
Most Organizations Benefit From a Mature Cloud Strategy
Today’s cloud adoptions are wide and varied. Large enterprises are composed of vast, hybrid multi-cloud strata, often incorporating legacy technology acquired at various times and haphazardly equipped from department to department. But a fractured cloud approach can leave IT wanting in terms of shared automation and standard security policies.

Not all organizations have addressed best practices around common areas like CI/CD, resource optimizations, or common policies for multiple clouds. And many teams are just getting the hang of the new cloud-native stack. But studies show that a mature approach to cloud operations can pay dividends in the long run—and this approach hinges on cloud platform teams.

HashiCorp recently released the findings from its third annual State of Cloud Strategy Survey, which surveyed 1,000 technology practitioners on their cloud adoptions. In short, the report discovered that increased cloud maturity equates to increased overall value. Below, I’ll distill the major findings from the report to better understand how cloud-native operations are maturing.

State of Cloud Maturity

Most organizations are moderately increasing their cloud investments. Overall, 56% increased their cloud spending in the last year. Increases were much higher for higher cloud-maturity organizations and stilted for lower-maturity organizations. The findings demonstrate general confidence in cloud adoption, even amid economic uncertainties.

There is also persistent optimism in multi-cloud strategies. In fact, 73% of companies said a multi-cloud strategy helped advance or achieve their business goals. And to successfully accomplish a multi-cloud strategy, respondents ranked security, uptime and availability, infrastructure scalability and regulatory compliance as top factors.

However, there is still a lot of waste in the cloud. Nearly all organizations (94%) said they have avoidable cloud spending. These expenses most commonly stem from areas like over-provisioning resources, idle or unused resources, cost premiums or a lack of expiration date on cloud resources.

Benefits of Maturing Cloud-Native Operations

Overall, there are many reasons for adopting a multi-cloud approach—the report found reliability, cost reduction, security and governance and digital transformation as top motivators. And on average, high-maturity cloud adopters tend to reap the rewards more often, the report found. Some of these top rewards ranged from a stronger security posture to better visibility and increased automation. Furthermore, half of high cloud-maturity organizations reported successfully saving money using multi-cloud.

Most interestingly, perhaps, is that high-maturity cloud adopters said they are better equipped to attract, motivate and retain talent than lower-maturity cloud adopters (74% compared with 48%). It’s generally easier to pull in talent when operating with attractive cutting-edge technologies that look good on a resume.

Spotlight on Platform Teams

Even then, skills shortages remained the top bottleneck in most organizations’ ability to operationalize multi-cloud and set up platform teams. This can be side-stepped by reskilling or upskilling staff, incorporating more consultants or increasing the budget. But the best strategy is to standardize on a common operating model.

In that vein, investments into the platform engineering concept are rising. In fact, 92% of organizations are adopting, standardizing or scaling platform teams. Low cloud maturity firms tend to lag on platformification, most likely due to lacking the necessary skills to build and maintain internal developer-facing infrastructure, like the tools used to measure and improve developer productivity and satisfaction at LinkedIn. Others are still on the cusp of exploring how to implement it.

The idea of platform engineering is still taking root, so it was interesting to see how organizations described the platform teams’ roles and responsibilities. The results showed platform engineers commonly take the reins on everything from architecting solutions to tooling acquisition and internal evangelism. Here are the five top-cited roles for platform teams:
- Develop and standardize a cloud infrastructure strategy (95%)
- Architect cloud solutions (95%)
- Create and distribute cloud management, operational policies and best practices (94%)
- Determine which cloud vendors and/or technologies are used in production (93%)
- Define and measure site reliability (91%)
The Path to Cloud Maturity

In general, companies are still confident about their cloud trajectories. But, getting to a mature multi-cloud state will take work. One area that needs further scrutiny is cybersecurity, as password or credential leakage is now seen as the most prevalent cloud security threat. Organizations will require better DevSecOps best practices to avoid such leaks. That, and certain open source cloud-native tools could also aid security and compliance efforts.

A mature cloud strategy will also require localizing development efforts through shared platforms and increasing infrastructure automation. On that note, 83% of organizations say automation tools are important or extremely important to operationalize their multi-cloud infrastructure. More automation for cloud-native areas like CI/CD, observability and Kubernetes management could also abstract complexity and fill the skills gap.

As the HashiCorp study clearly showed, those organizations that have matured their cloud strategy are far better off because of it. They tend to understand their workflows better and can more seamlessly introduce new automation. Now, it’s only a matter of getting there …
August 10, 2023
FinOps Gaining Ground, But Progress is Slow

A CloudBolt Software survey found that while the majority (98%) of respondents worked for organizations with a formal FinOps team (82%) or are actively considering adding one (16%), realizing value from FinOps is slow. More than half of existing FinOps teams (54%) were formed just 12 months ago or less, the survey also found.

The trouble is, only one in of 500 respondents claimed to achieve any material value from FinOps to date. More than three-quarters of respondents (76%) said they will have to wait two to three years to see real FinOps-driven results.

The survey polled 500 executives, engineers and developers at companies with over 5,000 employees in the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom and Australia. It was conducted by Wakefield Research on behalf of CloudBolt Software, a provider of a platform for managing distributed computing environments.

A total of 45% of respondents also questioned FinOps efficacy in the real world. Specifically, 15% flagged FinOps as being “theoretically easy but harder in practice,” with another 13% regarding it as “much ado about nothing.” Another 10% said it is “nothing more than a suggested framework,” while 7% labeled FinOps as “a necessary evil.”

Nevertheless, a full 89% also described FinOps as the silver bullet for reining in the complexity of cloud cost management, with 68% noting that FinOps is among their organization’s most strategic priorities for 2023. The average size of a FinOps team is now 4.1 people, with the “director level” being the senior-most leader on the team 53% of the time, the survey noted.

A total of 71% noted that achieving this year’s IT goals without a FinOps practice would pose a significant challenge, with 74% reporting that FinOps is now on par with ITOps, DevOps, SecOps and other IT disciplines.

In addition, 71% of respondents said funding for FinOps initiatives increased in 2023, with 58% reporting key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to the C-suite or board of directors.

CloudBolt Software CTO Kyle Campos said it’s clear that when it comes to reining in costs, large enterprises are struggling to effectively manage IT across multiple silos. In many cases, organizations were investing heavily in IT before and during the COVID-19 pandemic to drive digital business transformation initiatives without many cost controls being put in place, he added.

Now that organizations are encountering economic headwinds, many chief financial officers are now asking IT leaders to be a lot more efficient, noted Campos.

Developers, in particular, have for years been provisioning cloud infrastructure resources with little to no oversight. Unfortunately, developers are prone to leaving the proverbial lights on by, for example, leaving application development environments running over a weekend or simply forgetting that a virtual machine has been left to run for weeks—sometimes even months.

Developers are also not especially good at alerting IT leaders of possible spikes in consumption due to, for example, a data-intensive workload being constructed. No finance team likes to be surprised by a monthly bill for a cloud service that is twice as much as the previous month.

The one thing that is certain is that time is of the essence. FinOps, at its core, may not necessarily be a new idea, but IT organizations that fail to practice it may soon find themselves being held more accountable than any time in recent memory.

July 5, 2023
Survey Surfaces Raft of Enterprise IT Challenges

A survey of enterprise IT leaders found less than a third (32%) are extremely confident that they have the right technology, processes and people in place to execute an effective approach to IT management.

The survey, conducted by Rocket Software, polled 275 U.S. IT leaders in organizations with more than 1,000 employees. A full 93% of IT leaders are also committed to maximize the value of investments in existing platforms.

As a result, the top priorities for IT leaders are hybrid cloud computing (65%), data and content management (68%) followed by DevOps and infrastructure and application modernization, tied at 58%, and automation (57%).

A total of 62% noted they have a much greater focus on efficiency due to the economic landscape, with faster DevOps processes, automated processes and increasing overall output as the top three improvements that would be most impactful for increasing efficiency.

The survey also suggested many organizations still have much work to do to achieve those goals, with 63% of respondents spending anywhere from six to 15 hours on manual data entry and analysis each week.

Phil Buckellew, president of infrastructure modernization for Rocket Software, said most organizations are still trying to determine the right level of DevOps to adopt. Few organizations have implemented DevOps workflows on an end-to-end basis, with many employing a mix of DevOps and waterfall processes to build and deploy applications across a hybrid cloud computing environment, he noted.

Overall, IT leaders are most worried about improving overall IT performance (60%), data security (50%), process risk and compliance (46%) and the need to improve agility (41%), the survey found. Respondents also noted that they measure success within their IT organization by increased efficiency (71%), optimized resources (67%) and reduced risk (63%).

The survey makes it clear that, despite challenges, enterprise IT organizations are committed to hybrid cloud computing as they become more comfortable with using various platforms that are fit for purpose, said Buckellew.

Mainframes, for example, continue to play a major role in running online transaction processing (OLTP) applications alongside analytics applications that are now being infused with artificial intelligence (AI) capabililities, noted Buckellew.

A quarter of survey respondents also identified providing cloud applications with access to mainframe data as an area where they need additional tools, followed by automation (22%).

The biggest automation obstacles are the complexity of implementing automation (18%), resistance to process change among workforce (18%) and lack of skillsets to implement automation (18%), the survey finds.

As always, the biggest challenge in enterprise IT environments is often simple inertia. Organizations that have been building and deploying applications on mainframes, for example, have been relying on waterfall processes for decades. Many of them have now adopted DevOps processes to varying degrees, but few have completely replaced legacy approaches to building and deploying software, noted Buckellew.

It’s not likely the management of complex hybrid cloud computing environments will be simplified any time soon, but progress continues to be made. Soon, AI may automate many existing manual tasks. In the meantime, however, the number of enterprise IT organizations standardizing on a single IT platform remains few and far between.

June 29, 2023
Good Things Happen When DevSecOps and Cloud Collide

The marriage of cloud and software development is arguably the heart and soul of digital transformation. Providing pathways to greater efficiencies, lower costs and greater enterprise performance, the duo is poised to fundamentally transform industries as we know them. The compounding complexities of hybrid cloud operations and software supply chains, however, have led to a greater risk of vulnerabilities, errors and attacks.

Increasingly wrapped around microservices, containers and orchestration platforms, the complexities of cloud expansion and software development couldn’t be more intertwined or expose more complicated risks than they do today.

Software: A World of Consistent Change

The state of software development is one of consistent change. Whether we call it agile or adaptive matters far less than the need to infuse operations with a new mindset and culture about the need for continuous development. Increasingly that includes the infusion of security disciplines and technologies directly into the main artery of that development.

Enter DevSecOps, an approach to software that integrates security initiatives at every stage of the software development lifecycle to deliver high-performing secure applications.

The cause is not lost on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and its cybersecurity center of excellence (NCCoE) which has announced a DevSecOps project dedicated to “developing and documenting an applied risk-based approach and recommendations for secure DevOps and software supply chain practices consistent with the secure software development framework (SSDF), cybersecurity supply chain risk management (C-SCRM), and other NIST, government, and industry guidance.”

This is a far cry from software development of old. According to CTO Emeritus, Hu Yoshida, “Software, once the product of developers confined to writing long lines of code for specific applications, is now an exercise of integration – an amalgamation of third-party components provided by a variety of vendors, cloud providers, and open source software (OSS) groups. In fact, today, as much as 90% of code comes from such outlets, creating a software supply chain.”

Although these new processes provide great advantages in terms of access to innovation and faster development cycles, the addition of external touchpoints and third-party software increases the risk of flaws, mistakes, and vulnerabilities. These risks only rise further when considering their deployment, usage, and management across complex hybrid cloud environments.

How to Take Advantage of the Collision

Cloud-based data is accounting for 39% of successful cyberattacks. Containerized applications, which have been a boon to both migration and management can also lead to vulnerabilities – which is fitting for security to be cited as a top concern for more than half of the organizations surveyed.

From business continuity to business performance, organizations must begin assuming a security posture that considers the rising confluence of cloud management and software development.

The idea is simple: You must find a way, a process, a method, and the right partners to help secure all workloads across any cloud environment, regardless of the platform or the amount of data and application real estate needed.

By establishing this model, organizations are able to create a fundamental layer of protection against the ever-evolving threat of cybercriminals. Take one of our large banking customers, for example, who runs critical applications on AWS with stringent security and compliance requirements. We implemented a secured framework to protect their applications running on modern, cloud-native services like containers and Lambda functions using DevSecOps principles and cloud-native SIEM solutions. This enables them to scale their business in the cloud without worrying about compliance violations.

One of our large pharmaceutical customers with a very large presence in both AWS and Azure experienced challenges keeping their cloud security posture in pace with the growing business demands on the cloud, increasing risk to the environment. By establishing a security process using cloud security posture management, we were able to significantly reduce cloud misconfigurations and auto-remediate several cloud vulnerabilities proactively to improve the security posture of the environment.

The bottom line is that building security into the workloads will provide a fundamental layer of protection. The collision of cloud and DevSecOps is real. Organizations would be wise to realize it and take advantage of it to dramatically improve business performance and resiliency.

March 8, 2023
Infrastructure Abstraction Will Be Key to Managing Multi-Cloud

There’s no doubt we’re now living in a hybrid multi-cloud age. Companies are using major cloud providers like AWS, Azure and GCP with niche cloud computing providers emerging within the market. Simultaneously, many organizations still retain workloads in on-premises data centers or embrace colocation. Regardless of deployment pattern, DevOps teams desire the same elasticity as the cloud, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to consistently manage the nuances of each service provider.

To support today’s distributed polyglot architectures, a common layer could ease issues when deploying applications and provisioning various servers. By decoupling the infrastructure control plane from specific cloud providers, a unified management console could bring visibility into cost and performance, empowering CloudOps with knowledge before they commit. But engineering such an outcome would rely on plugins for each environment and a robust set of APIs to enable programmatic control.

I recently met with Jake Warner, Cycle.io, to explore how increased infrastructure abstraction can solve the above problems. According to Warner, a standard layer for computing management is needed to enable consistent control over multi-cloud and bespoke on-premise environments. Below, we’ll define this concept and consider the benefits infrastructure abstraction could bring to modern enterprise software development.

The Problems Facing Infrastructure Management

We like to think that the cloud is pervasive and that everyone’s on board with a similar computing style. However, this is far from the truth. Multi-cloud is rising, and 95% of businesses are making multi-cloud a strategic priority in 2022, a Valtix study found. Yet only about half of respondents felt they had the appropriate tools and skills required to execute a multi-cloud strategy.

“There’s a lot of value in multi-cloud, including reducing risk, ensuring better uptime and the flexibility to select the best hardware for the use case,” said Warner. “But multi-cloud is extremely complex.” Using multiple clouds means supporting increasingly variable operational processes for each environment. Whether it’s AWS, GCP, Azure, Equinix or Vultr, operators also require a deep level of visibility into telemetry data. This becomes complicated to track as software is increasingly modular and distributed across multiple computing regions.

Furthermore, on-premises data centers are far from dead—surprisingly, a Spiceworks study found that 98% of enterprises still used on-premises servers. Traditional servers are often preferred due to corporate restrictions or to meet security compliance mandates. It could also be a cultural case of “if it works, don’t fix it.” The dilemma is that you can’t easily obtain common cloud features like auto-scaling and load balancing while on your own infrastructure.

Another issue Warner described is that traditional platform-as-a-service (PaaS) companies present inherent limitations if you aim to build substantive applications and services. “Many of these PaaS offerings make it really easy to get started but, more often than not, developers are quickly forced to make compromises with their approach. These compromises can create long-term technical issues, especially when it’s time to scale,” he said. “Need a server with a specific hardware configuration in a targeted region? Good luck. For most PaaS companies, their exit ramp is just as defined as their on-ramp.”

Movements Toward Infrastructure Abstraction

We’re already seeing movement within the market to manage the operational burdens of multi-cloud. One example is the Infrastructure Abstraction Layer (IAL), open sourced by Cycle.io, which Warner explained can act as a standardized system for deployments. With the specification, an infrastructure provider can generate an API endpoint to enable the provisioning of infrastructure without requiring a deep integration between both services. With this endpoint live, an application development platform or orchestrator gains the ability to send standardized JSON payloads to provision servers, allocate IPs, configure regions and a number of other requests. The response, another JSON payload, confirms that the desired request has been completed and includes a unique ID.

With more programmatic control over infrastructure, an engineer could interface with a standardized list of all the servers, across a number of providers, to deploy to and act upon this information in one unified console. This layer is an opportune location to help compare costs and server configurations for different regions too. It’s also an advantageous spot to filter by proximity to showcase the closest available servers to optimize delivery.

Benefits of Unifying Multi-Cloud Deployment

Decoupling the infrastructure management layer from service providers can bring potential benefits to DevOps, said Warner. For one, it enables operators to extend infrastructure automation into their private data centers, helping them achieve the same programmability they would have in the cloud. A degree of standardization can remove many of the cons of multi-cloud, too—”Developers can move from one provider to another provider without any major changes along the way,” he said.

Of course, IT doesn’t want an added burden. This is why an API-based solution is required to enable programmability, said Warner. By taking a RESTful API approach to managing a hybrid infrastructure, operators could create custom flows based on fine-grained environmental characteristics that change over time, like latency, expense or location. “One of the neat things is it allows infrastructure providers to constantly make tweaks and improvements without having to resubmit their integration with an underlying platform,” said Warner.

The Flexibility of LowOps

Today’s software deployment is increasingly wide and varied—a recent HashiCorp report found that 76% of organizations are already multi-cloud. Multi-cloud brings many advantages, yet it also multiplies the number of operational tasks required. At the same time, organizations want to leverage investments into on-premises data centers for as long as they are economically viable. Automating DevOps for such a varied infrastructure can be difficult without a unified layer decoupled from each niche computing area.

According to Warner, companies require a LowOps platform and the flexibility to abstract this automation on their own infrastructure when appropriate, which can vary widely. For example, operators may be working with a fleet of tens of thousands of IoT devices. Furthermore, as we’ve covered previously, a LowOps method can be beneficial to small-to-medium-sized companies that may lack the resources to support complex infrastructure like Kubernetes.

Could something like IAL ever become an open standard? Well, at the time of writing, the IAL specification has only been implemented by Cycle.io and a few of its infrastructure partners, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be extrapolated into a common specification down the line, said Warner. He even foresees a community marketplace or shared registry for infrastructure abstractions, enabling platforms to support hundreds of cloud providers.

In conclusion, the need for LowOps, combined with the rise of multi-cloud and the staying power of on-premises data centers, is fueling a requirement for a decoupled management center. Infrastructure abstraction could enable the convenience of a PaaS while empowering operators with custom infrastructure choices.

November 17, 2022
A DevOps Reset for a Multi-Cloud World
In the world of DevOps, only two things really matter:
- To release applications and updates as quickly as possible
- To have access to resources (processing, storage, networks) able to run those apps, as cost-effectively as possible.
The measures used to achieve these twin goals should work together seamlessly–otherwise, you’re inefficient. But software development and IT operations have been on separate journeys, and it now takes layers of tools, specialized expertise and lots of precious time to distribute and manage applications where they need to run. Organizations tolerate all this complexity (and the delays and costs that come with it) since they see no alternative. But what if there was an easier way? I’ll examine the two fundamental shifts driving software development and IT operations and see why current processes are so cumbersome.

Shift One: From Monolithic Applications to Microservices

In the beginning, applications were monolithic, with all functions and code packaged together. That approach was manageable when apps were updated once or twice a year, but not when updates are expected multiple times each day. Finally someone realized that applications would be much easier to build, improve and maintain if they were divided into smaller units called microservices—independent, loosely coupled, individually deployable services, each one addressing a specific function.

To support microservices, a technology stack has emerged, similar to steps on a ladder:
- To make them portable, microservices are packaged in containers—a lightweight, standard way for applications to move between environments and run independently. Everything needed to run the microservice such as settings, system tools, libraries and dependencies is packaged inside the container.
- A single application could have hundreds of containers associated with it. How do you manage them? Along came Kubernetes (aka K8s), open source software for deploying and orchestrating containers within a cluster of virtual machines. (Note the word cluster—the significance will be discussed momentarily.)
- Since microservices are updated constantly, how do you make sure the correct version is running? Along came GitOps to provide version control for all updates to all those microservices. Git repositories provide a single source of truth for the desired application state, as well as a record of every code change.
Finally, we need to set up continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) for rolling out application improvements and new features. Along came ArgoCD, a GitOps continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes that continuously monitors running applications, compares the current, live state against the target state specified in a Git repository, and resolves discrepancies.

Shift Two: From On-Premises to Multi-Cloud

Not long ago, IT departments were having hot debates about this strange new concept called the public cloud and whether it could possibly play a role in their operations. But once they discovered how easy it was to spin up resources, the floodgates opened.

The first tentative steps typically involved hybrid clouds combining an on-site private cloud with spillover into a public cloud for workload spikes. These initial forays mushroomed to dozens or hundreds of clouds, in different locations and with different providers. It’s a mind shift happening in enterprises globally—where they once had a small number of clouds, now their cloud operations are huge, growing and boundless. Companies are also discovering that the cloud is not just an easier, more cost-effective way to run their applications, it unlocks new opportunities.

Now there are core clouds, edge clouds for hyper-local applications, regional clouds, clouds for high availability and resilience and more. Edge computing is another option, where low latency is required for operations at the customer-facing frontend cloud while backend processing happens in the primary cloud. But this is just the beginning.

Continuous Delivery is Now Way Too Complicated

Today, an application may have dozens of microservices distributed across different clouds that need to work together—perhaps some in cloud one, a few in cloud two, others in cloud 40, etc. The scale gets huge very quickly; for example, if 100 microservices are being delivered to 100 clouds, there are 10,000 mutations that have to be configured and managed.

This is the new normal, and DevOps needs to adapt to it. Processes should mesh transparently, but connecting microservices across multiple clouds and cloud instances requires inter-cluster communication, which Kubernetes (and GitOps/ArgoCD on top of it) does not natively support.

To make all this work requires specialized skill sets, so organizations hire teams with expertise in continuous delivery, multi-cloud, networking, security and automation. The first step involves distributing K8s containers to clouds where the microservices are going to run. Some enterprises create their own distribution system, others choose to download, install, and manage third-party software such as open source ArgoCD.

The second step is more complex: Securely connecting those microservices across different clouds and K8s clusters. This involves integrating complex service meshes, load balancers, API gateways and network/firewall automation tools, all feeding into a centralized console for configuration and monitoring.

The result is inevitable: Lots of extra costs, inefficiency, potential security risk and delayed time to market with resulting risks to the business. Development teams update microservices daily but depend on CloudOps, NetOps, SecOps and other flavors of Ops to deliver them to the different clouds and clusters where they need to run.

Despite the best efforts of these different stakeholders, it can take days or weeks to update cloud networks and security for each change.

Simplifying Multi-Cloud Operations With an Overlay Network

When hundreds of microservices are being distributed across more and more clouds and updated constantly, you need an alternative—one that streamlines current operations without sacrificing security or application performance. Let’s set aside traditional methods and think about how it should be done.

First, the solution should be easy to use, so DevOps people don’t have to be proficient with the underlying technology or be dependent on NetOps, SecOps and/or CloudOps people who are. Instead, just provide some basic information about the Git repository and the clouds where you want the microservices to run, and an overlay network handles the rest.

It should be comprehensive—integrating ArgoCD, the service mesh, the K8s ingress gateway, zero-trust security, resilience/failover, load balancing and multi-cloud networking — all those elements that normally require assembling and configuring individual tools.

It should make multi-cloud Kubernetes application operations easy to manage, with a single dashboard where you can securely deploy, connect and monitor microservices in all your clouds and clusters.

Finally, the solution should be available as a service, rather than having to install an ArgoCD server and try to manage it yourself (or hire a team to support it). And if you have questions or need help, competent people should be available to give you a hand.

Disruptive – In a Good Way

Get ready for self-service multi-cloud Kubernetes decoupled from the underlying networking and security details. It’s an approach that’s about to upend how microservices are deployed and managed, so DevOps can get back to what really matters: Delivering applications as fast as possible, on the resources where they need to run. The ability to deliver new features in a fraction of the previous times while significantly reducing costs and without compromising security will mean a competitive advantage and a stronger bottom line.
November 9, 2022
More Choices, More Problems: The Double-Edged Sword of Multi-Cloud

Multi-cloud environments can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, there are clear benefits to using whatever cloud or tool is best for your particular needs, regardless of vendor – in theory. In practice, however, the more choices you have, the more complex and expensive your environment becomes. In fact, Andreessen Horowitz postulates that multi-cloud architectures are oftentimes costing enterprises more than if they had stayed with on-premises systems.

Enterprises need a multi-cloud environment to compete in such a rapidly expanding digital economy. For the majority of companies, completely repatriating to on-prem isn’t an option–the train has already left that station for most. But what do you do when the costs of staying competitive become more and more prohibitive, ironically making you less competitive?

Hybrid Clouds Became Multi-Cloud

When hybrid cloud–a mix of public cloud services and on-prem systems–became table stakes for enterprises, companies only needed one public cloud service provider. Most put all of their eggs in the AWS basket, splitting their workloads between AWS public cloud services and on-premises systems.

This setup provided more agility and flexibility to enterprises and lowered costs by reducing dependence on expensive, cumbersome on-prem hardware. A lot of capex was replaced by opex; with cloud services, you only pay for what you use as you use it without the physical infrastructure and maintenance costs.

Inevitably, the cost and efficiency benefits of the cloud drove companies to migrate more and larger workloads from their on-premises systems, increasing cloud costs over time. And the more workloads you had with a single vendor, the more beholden to that vendor you became. If AWS raised their prices, you had no alternative but to pay more.

Soon, hybrid clouds grew into multi-clouds, with other public cloud providers such as Azure and GPC in the mix. Sometimes this was by choice–why be locked into one vendor and suite of tools when you could choose from multiple vendors that might offer better pricing or have some products that are better suited for your needs?

More often, though, it was involuntary–developers spinning up their own clouds and resources for their own purposes without consulting IT, creating shadow IT. Or companies acquiring other organizations whose cloud choices varied. Either way, the enterprise is using multiple clouds whether they planned to or not.

Regardless of how it happened, once more clouds were introduced, complexity multiplied.

The Multi-Cloud Hydra

Too many organizations underestimate the complexity they’re introducing with each additional cloud. Operating systems, networking, cost monitoring and tracking, workload methodologies and data aggregation are all different for each vendor. How many people in your organization know what all these differences are and how to navigate between them? How do you effectively manage, govern and monitor usage, costs and security and compliance issues when each public cloud does it differently? You have to manually collect data from each cloud and aggregate it in spreadsheets for analysis. How accurate can that be, how long does it take and at what cost in terms of people and time?

Furthermore, how will you be able to accurately pinpoint waste and inefficiency? If you’re chasing down engineers to turn off resources or having to choose between one manual cost-efficiency action versus another, the waste will add up and your budget will be inaccurate.

As if that’s not chaotic and complicated enough, development teams spread out across the enterprise adopt different tools and use them for their own purposes, without any alignment or coordination. The same tool is purchased multiple times. Best practices between teams aren’t shared. Everything needs to be custom-coded, creating layers of “spaghetti code” that blur visibility and are ripe for misconfigurations, which results in security vulnerabilities. And let’s not forget shadow IT, which IT departments don’t even know about, let alone monitor.

You started your journey with a unified cloud strategy, but now you’re struggling with an ever-growing number of different clouds and strategies for different groups. Each group prefers different tools, clouds, methods and processes, and this has left you stuck with siloed teams, unending tool sprawl, infinite lines of custom code, worsening security risks and no clear visibility. And the meter keeps spinning, costing you millions.

So, what do you do now?

Taming the Chaos

To survive and thrive in the new cloud order, enterprises can’t just write off exploding cloud costs as “the cost of innovation,” or otherwise justify their cloud chaos as par for the course. Too many are doing that now, and it won’t end well, as we’re likely headed into recession and growing uncertainty and turbulence in markets.

First and foremost, taming cloud chaos and getting multi-cloud costs under control requires visibility and interoperability. You must be able to view, monitor, manage and analyze all clouds from one place; manually collecting that data with spreadsheets won’t do anymore.

Development teams can no longer be siloed off from each other. There should be a single repository where all teams can access and utilize all tools, scripts, and previously coded integrations. When everything is viewable and available in a single place, no one has to buy the same tool twice or reinvent the wheel when using it. Once a tool has been integrated, any other team that wants to use that tool can simply re-use the integration, configuration, and policies that have already been created and vetted. If multiple groups are doing the same thing, an approved automation process can be created and shared.

True cost optimization also requires organizational awareness and shared responsibility. If people don’t know they’re wasting resources, how will they be able to stop? Enterprises need a system that detects waste and cost overruns and notifies stakeholders accordingly.

For example, a development environment may be up and running even though it’s no longer being used. An automatic alert could be sent to the appropriate team leader, reminding them to shut it down. A developer provisioning cloud resources might not choose the most cost-effective option, but the alert system would flag their activity and notify them of a cheaper alternative. Cloud resources that are left on overnight or on weekends would also be detected and shut down. Commitments would be conducted automatically every day and no longer require individuals to remember to do them manually.

There’s just no going back to the traditional whack-a-mole style of cloud management and cost control. Enterprises that understand this and create a holistic framework for cloud management capabilities based on simplicity, visibility, unity and awareness will be in a much better position to navigate the choppy economic waters to come.

October 19, 2022
From Cloud Chaos to Cloud Smart With Multi-Cloud Services

Organizations that embrace multi-cloud services experience real results and a heap of advantages—including greater resiliency, agility and data sovereignty. This is why it’s no surprise the majority of enterprises today are using two or more public clouds, with 81% reporting in a recent survey that they plan to adopt a multi-cloud strategy by 2024.

But despite the benefits, it’s also been proven that multi-cloud can be complicated and even overwhelming. It requires an entirely new approach to optimize workloads, simplify development and tackle a growing pattern of operational complexities. This has been described as cloud chaos, where greater cloud choice has led to a massive spike in complexity. Most report that building new apps is slow and cumbersome, and managing their entire app portfolio across disparate clouds is difficult and expensive. No wonder, when each cloud requires its teams to use proprietary tools that are siloed and incompatible with one another. Meanwhile, for the average employee, getting fast, secure access to critical apps from anywhere is imperative, yet it’s often a challenge. All this complexity has broad repercussions on the business, from managing costs to attracting and retaining top talent.

Tackling this multi-cloud complexity needs to start with creating a layer of abstraction that spans various, diverse cloud environments and doesn’t hinder access to each cloud provider’s unique services. However, organizations must take it a step further to solve the challenge of how best to build, manage, govern and optimize apps and workloads across a multi-cloud environment.

Multi-Cloud Services

Multi-cloud services—a fast-emerging category of IT services—are the key to helping organizations implement a multi-cloud strategy that simplifies and streamlines development, operations, networking and security across clouds. A multi-cloud service provides a consistent API, object model, identity management and other core functions across clouds. And, it has one or more of the following characteristics:

1. Runs on a single cloud but supports interactions with at least two different clouds
2. Runs on multiple clouds and supports interactions with at least two different clouds
3. Runs on any cloud or edge, even in disconnected mode, and basic operations are fully automated

Multi-cloud services can be used to standardize cloud infrastructure and operations into one platform to reduce the complexity of individually building or consuming the equivalent native services from multiple clouds. In this model, public clouds, data centers, private clouds and edge locations are all verticals, and multi-cloud services are horizontals that provide functionality across these environments.

Let’s take a closer look at the five most common categories of multi-cloud services and when to use them.

1. Application Services

Application services allow teams to use core services in a standardized manner across clouds. These core services include observability, replication, backup, and restoration. By implementing application services, enterprises can increase their speed of innovation and make their technologies easier to use. Examples of application services include developer tooling, databases, modular development platforms, artificial intelligence, machine learning and serverless and CI/CD capabilities.

2. Infrastructure Services

If your organization chooses to run its applications as VMs, containers, or both, using infrastructure services is the right move to standardize management and operations across the clouds. Different types of multi-cloud infrastructure services include the ability to manage and observe compute, storage and network services leveraging VMs or containers, infrastructure automation and Kubernetes management solutions. When applied, infrastructure services can improve resiliency, security, performance, interoperability and portability.

3. Security Services

When using multiple clouds, an issue enterprises run into is that each individual cloud has its own security tools and approaches, making it difficult to ensure your enterprise is protected against cyber threats. That’s where multi-cloud security services come in – centralizing security operations and secure software supply chains. Some examples of multi-cloud security services are network detection and response, endpoint detection and response, next-gen antivirus and secure access service edge. These services enable organizations to achieve cohesive visibility, context and control by providing a single interface.

4. End-User Services: Access to Data and Services

No matter how big your enterprise is, or how many applications you use, it’s necessary to provide the right level of access to applications and data. But this can prove difficult when you have a multi-cloud infrastructure. Multi-cloud end-user services, which consist of virtual desktops, device management and end-user application delivery, will provide your organization a uniform way for all employees to have quick, secure access to your applications, all while simplifying device management.

5. Data Plane

In the past, workloads were restricted to a single data plane contained within a single public or private cloud or edge location. Now with the rise of multi-cloud services, enterprises can run workloads in the multi-cloud data plane. A prime example of workloads running in the multi-cloud data plane is a distributed application that runs in multiple cloud provider environments. Part of the application might run in the private cloud and the other services are deployed in a public cloud. The multi-cloud data plane is where the containers, services and data exist and where user interaction occurs.

From Cloud Chaos to Cloud Smart

The desired destination of every multi-cloud journey should be to move from a position of cloud chaos to one of cloud smart. Being cloud smart means taking an architected and planned approach to multi-cloud and digital transformation. As more enterprises adopt multiple clouds, multi-cloud services will be key to becoming cloud smart by helping to reduce complexity and risk and proving the freedom to select the right cloud for all situations based on technical and business requirements.

October 4, 2022