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Tag: hybrid cloud

  • How to Manage Data in Hybrid Cloud Environments

    How to Manage Data in Hybrid Cloud Environments

    We’ve long-since established that multi-generational, multi-cloud environments are the new norm. But, how does one go about managing data in those environments?

    In this post, we’ll take a look at the ramifications of this hybrid cloud reality and best practices for managing your data for increased scalability and heightened availability.

    It’s All Cloud

    Whether it’s Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure (or some combination thereof), cloud is all the rage, with a hybrid approach gaining momentum with 81% of cloud users working with two or more providers (according to a recent Gartner study). Not only does this strategy take companies out of the business of hosting their own applications, but it also leads to benefits such as avoiding vendor lock-in, reduced costs and optimized performance.

    Benefits to Mixing Cloud and On-Prem Environments

    Mixing cloud and on-prem environments means you can pick and choose where your workloads and data live—it’s really an optimization. For example, if your application is CPU intensive, you can run it on the cloud provider that gives you the most CPU for your dollar. Similarly, if your data workload requires significant storage, you can go to the cloud provider that offers the best bang for your buck on storage.

    Businesses should look at their application and database and then use the cloud provider that offers the best of class for that workload. A mixed cloud also gives you the ability to always have a low-cost secondary site recovery plan in place—you’re always ready to spin up on another cloud provider if you need to. 

    Managing Data: The Challenges of Hybrid Cloud

    The benefits of multi-cloud are many, but when it comes to managing your data, things can get tricky. Not only do you have multiple cloud providers to balance, you also have to consider data stored on-premises and how that data is accessed from the cloud. 

    You also have to consider data replication between clouds. If you’re not doing a full mirror of your data between each cloud, it’s critical you remain acutely aware of what data lives where. You’ll want to consider creating extensive documentation and diagrams of what data lives in which cloud. If you are replicating data between clouds, you also have to justify the additional operating and engineering cost to accomplish your goal. 

    How to Manage Data in Hybrid Cloud Environments

    Fortunately, there are several libraries providing abstractions for cloud services, such as object stores. Leveraging abstractions within your applications allows you to move more freely between cloud providers. 

    Companies should strongly consider storing their data in a consistent manner within each cloud, leveraging the same technologies to reduce the sprawl, maintenance and expertise required to operate those technologies. For example, use a relational database that all the cloud vendors provide—for data updated and changed frequently, it should live in the scope of the local cloud provider to reduce latency and network costs, because traffic within the cloud provider is generally free. If you were to write to a database outside the cloud provider, it’d cost more and be considerably slower.

    The leaders in the cloud provider space offer a fairly secure environment for storing sensitive data, as long as you’re following good practices and using your own source of encryption. However, it all comes down to your individual environment. For some organizations, there will be workloads that should remain on-premises—for instance, highly sensitive data for which regulations require on-premises storage.

    If data has to be stored and encrypted on-premises, many cloud providers offer a secure means of connecting your cloud environments to your on-premises environment for access to sensitive information, such as providing secure VPN connectivity to virtual private clouds. 

    Multi-cloud might not be for everyone; you have to weigh the benefits with the costs, especially as those factors relate to your individual organization. While there are pitfalls, the practices and tooling to effectively manage your data in hybrid cloud environments are all out there. Because so many of us are choosing to run our workloads on multiple clouds, collectively we’ve overcome many of the aforementioned challenges and can take advantage of all the benefits hybrid cloud provides.

  • Overcoming Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Management Challenges with APM

    Overcoming Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Management Challenges with APM

    When companies move toward hybrid and multi-cloud, both leadership and IT can struggle to adapt their organizational structures and processes to a new, more complex way of doing things.

    With the classic form of DevOps, for example, operational monitoring and management procedures are radically new and different: from a management perspective, it almost appears as a free-for-all, making assessment and accountability to the business difficult to achieve on a regular, ongoing basis.

    The older system was straightforward: on-premises monitoring and management teams were organized around a technology stack, with associated monitoring and management tooling. The network, server and storage teams each had distinct processes. Different problems were escalated and triaged (Level One, Level Two, Level Three). It was formulaic—perhaps even annoying to some tech pros—but it worked.

    DevOps is different. Applications are changed, tested and deployed in production continuously, often on an hourly basis (or more frequently). It’s revolutionary because it delivers maximum business market agility, embraces technical and business evolution, and is never-ending. It radically redefines the concepts and approaches we associate with application and infrastructure support and triage processes.

    But there’s good news: Application performance solutions and workarounds are coalescing. Here’s a few ways we’re seeing teams evolve to overcome the challenge of hybrid and multi-cloud application and infrastructure management.

    Try a Monitoring Engineer

    Right now, we’re all experimenting—we’re in a digital Wild West. In that spirit, forward-looking outfits are working with the concept of a monitoring engineer (sometimes monitoring support), someone who owns the monitoring of everything important in the context of an application or a line of business.

    “Monitoring engineer” as a job title can mean many things. If you Google it you’ll find open positions for many kinds of these engineers. But for our purposes, it’s a stand-in for a new concept, a new way of thinking. To be clear, this isn’t a network monitoring engineer, or any other kind of job with the title of engineer. It’s a new way to better and more proactively align IT with the business goals of the company paying the bills.

    Traditionally, metrics have been aligned to the application or applications being built out—not the business itself. More importantly, these metrics aligned around answering questions like, “Is this specific element of infrastructure or application available and performing?” Especially at the infrastructure level, performance was defined typically as a technology resource utilization metric (i.e., how efficiently are technology resources being consumed). This new concept of monitoring engineer is designed to allow management to quickly get the answers it needs in a consolidated and focused fashion—to move, in effect, from resource-centric monitoring to service and application-centric monitoring.

    Application performance monitoring (APM) has evolved thanks to measurement focused on application availability and performance rather than infrastructure. APM requires a certain amount of applications knowledge. The monitoring engineer needs to know enough about the application environment, how the application is configured and how it’s deployed operationally but doesn’t have to be the expert in the application code itself.

    Importantly, a successful monitoring engineer requires time and focus—and management needs to set up a structure to support it. Any competent system administrator or network engineer who’s worked in a complex private cloud or on-prem hybrid environment would have the skills to do this. But these engineers need time and the ability to focus on their job, while adding APM skills to their repertoire.

    Creating Metrics That Matter

    Along with the dedicated monitoring engineer who’s minding the technology store for management, processes and languages must be standardized.

    Think back to when virtualization swept the tech pro world, some 10 or 15 years ago. We had to change and adjust. We have to do it again.

    We should start by standardizing the application languages tech pros use. How we choose languages should always be business-driven: Different languages are good at different things, which should be the deciding factor. The number of languages should also be limited, so management can be more straightforward. Similarly, standardization should be the default wherever possible to approaches considered for automated deployment and dynamic configuration management of both applications and infrastructure resources.

    Keeping things as simple as possible doesn’t mean not learning new things, however. Management will need to cultivate a culture of curiosity. Tech pros must learn new ways of working—if they don’t, the transfer to hybrid and multi-cloud will be a guaranteed slog, or worse.

    If the tech pros stay curious, they’ll stay ahead. The APM market is growing at a considerable rate, and the people with the curiosity to get involved in it are the ones who will succeed.

    APM gives tech pros a powerful tool they can easily add to their skillset by which they can then generate the data and the metrics in the language of the business. When metrics are business focused, they matter.

    The measurements the business (and customers) care about are fundamentally limited to four key metrics, in two classes:

    • Application performance—how much business work is being accomplished over time, along with the response-time experience of users.
    • Availability management—whether all resources associated with the entire technology stack are continuously up and available to service the applications, along with any and all associated errors.

    Taking this approach to measurement is about meeting the company needs in business terms, not IT. This approach is critical for ensuring excellent customer experience or an ability to immediately and cost-effectively respond to peaks in business demand. This approach answers the questions: What are users experiencing? How are specific pages and transactions performing? APM can also discover what infrastructure components are needed to support those applications delivering successful service.

    Answers like these can’t be discovered with infrastructure monitoring alone, nor with infrastructure-centric monitoring of application performance that infers performance from technology resource utilization rates. Nor can they be answered with network monitoring or storage monitoring. Only APM provides the answers the business needs. It’s the glue to bind together the different silos.

    Measurement Matters Most on a Thin Margin

    We’re in a new environment. In many ways, it’s the Wild West and there are many ways to win and lose. Few things seem absolutely right, except this: Tech pros need to be completely aligned with the businesses they work for.

    In the past, a strategy such as APM was perhaps better aligned with industry verticals. Companies operating with thin business margins were reluctant to measure. Now, it’s the opposite. Companies such as those in the e-commerce, B2B, B to high volume and B2C spaces continue to operate on thin margins and are now in a virtuous spiral. Their success depends on efficiency—and efficiency is key to making them win in the increasingly competitive marketplace.

    To achieve this level of success, companies must measure and assess where they’ve been and where they’re going. They need to do more than just keep up with the competition, they need to accept innovative processes such as DevOps, while continuously measuring their progress.

    Ultimately, speaking in the language of business can take many IT professionals outside their comfort zones. But APM gives the wary tech pros a powerful tool for generating the kinds of data and metrics management needs. APM grounds the business, but also makes sense of the new hybrid and multi-cloud environment. It’s a chance for management and IT to bridge the gap between us and them. It’s the best way to manage the changes to come.

  • Five Attributes of a Great DevOps Platform

    Five Attributes of a Great DevOps Platform

    As we move toward 2020, the expectations are high, the software industry is moving faster and the demand for rapid and continually improving digital experiences have raised the standard. To match the needs and demands of the market, firms around the world are embracing the DevOps culture to ensure and streamline the development, packaging, testing, deployment and maintenance of software at scale. 

    Every DevOps organization is defined by its own leadership, culture, practices, policies, leadership style, structure, talents, skills, technical capabilities, processes and tools. However, there are certain common characteristics that are important to consider before deciding a better DevOps platform to use in your organization. Today, we will discuss such important features that can help you while selecting your DevOps platform. 

    What is DevOps?

    DevOps is a mindset in an organization that enforces a set of collective practices to ensure easy collaboration between dev and ops so the business can run smoothly without any hassle. DevOps aims to fasten the time to market through frequent and incremental improvements to deliver quality software updates to customers. 

    The meaning and definitions of DevOps can vary from company to company. Automation being the focal point, firms want to focus on achieving zero-touch automation, with utmost security and governance as a priority in the delivery pipeline.

    Even though the meaning of DevOps varies, several inherent DevOps principles cannot be replaced, and they repeatedly insist on collaborative relationships, developing early, failing early, shared learning and continuous feedback. These DevOps principles enhance quality with improved deployment rates while simultaneously improving predictability, scalability and security of the production environment. Tech leaders in the company need to view DevOps as a holistic approach rather than a small set of guidelines for the teams, and DevOps guidelines should be aligned with the company’s long term technology vision and objectives. 

    Here are some facts to consider while deciding a better DevOps platform for your organization.

    A Mindset of a Unified Culture

    Culture plays a significant role in establishing the guidelines while embracing DevOps in any organization. Through DevOps culture, companies seek to bring dev and ops teams into harmony to promote collaboration, automation, process improvements, continuous iterative development and deployment methodologies. But above everything else, a sound DevOps culture fundamentally solves one of IT’s biggest people problems: bridging the gap between dev and ops teams to get them to stop working in silos and have common goals. 

    According to Gartner estimation, DevOps efforts fail 90% of the time when infrastructure and operations teams try to drive a DevOps initiative without nurturing a cultural shift in the first place. It is not just about the efficient tools or experts working; it is about the behavioral modifications and mentality necessary to effect cultural change.

    Hence, it is important for the firms to consider the culture of the company before selecting its tool as a potential DevOps tool for their development. 

    Automation Inside and Outside

    Automation is one of the key principles of a strong DevOps team because it has such a high return on investment. 

    Automation makes up as a large part of DevOps culture to standardize production platforms, and even firms believe it as true because standardization and automation help make deployments more predictable, easy and less prone to human errors. 

    Automate everything as part of the workflow process, including infrastructures, compliance and continuous delivery pipeline. For example, tools such as Artifactory can manage and control all your binary repositories to help your developers and ops collaborate and automate build and deploy tasks easily. Similarly, Docker allows development teams to containerize applications and automate application deployments with speed.

    By reducing manual, non-important and repetitive tasks, you will increase your development and testing speed while cutting down on human and unnecessary errors. Additionally, by automating tedious and repetitive tasks, firms free up team members to work on higher-level and more important tasks.

    Important to note here, JFrog Pipelines is an innovative DevOps automation solution that well integrates and connects all critical processes in the software delivery lifecycle in the company, from development to testing to production. Using minimum code, it allows you to create smart and event-driven workflows across tools and teams easily, to speed up the release of software applications. This helps you achieve continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous deployment and continuous monitoring in DevOps.

    Support Both Hybrid and Multi-Cloud

    What is Multi-cloud?

    Multi-cloud is the use of cloud computing from two or more public cloud providers in single network architecture to meet their business objectives. A multi-cloud strategy has many advantages. It avoids vendor lock-in, decreases latency, enhances business continuity, overhead cost reduction and maximizes flexibility for development teams. However, multi-cloud management comes with some challenges that require careful orchestration, and needs to pay close attention to security and governance issues.

    What is Hybrid-cloud?

    A hybrid cloud is a mixture of on-premises and off-premises IT resources. Based on business and compliance requirements, the hybrid cloud allows firms to move data and applications between private and public environments. 

    Hybrid cloud computing allows instant transfer of information between public and private environments, allowing enterprises to experience the benefits of both environments efficiently. 

    Flexibility, scalability and cost savings are some of the top benefits of hybrid-cloud. 

    Considering a platform that supports both multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud is the best solution for the enterprises moving toward the digital transformation ladder.

    Continuous Updates 

    Frequently rolling out updates, in a continuous sequence, to bring service improvements to consumer devices more rapidly and efficiently is what every firm is trying to do these days. The customer wants new features as early as possible and continuously. That is one reason why companies embrace automation and follow practices like continuous integration, continuous deployment and continuous delivery through tools such as GitHub, Artifactory, Circle CI, Docker, Kubernetes, etc. 

    The DevOps platform should be able to manage your DevOps pipeline from a single pane of glass. A platform that can provide a universal end-to-end solution that integrates with your ecosystem to orchestrate and optimize all critical processes in your CI/CD pipeline. Boosting fearless updates continuously from code to the edge in self-managed, on-prem, hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

    A Robust Community 

    All successful companies have built their own communities through their products and services. DevOps is all about the culture shift. Changing existing culture and moving forward is one of the hardest things to do—despite the benefits that DevOps offers, such as speed and agility. No matter what changes a team implements, embracing DevOps often comes to a halt once the companies realize it requires a change in culture and mentality of all the teams involved. This is where the value of community comes in, by fostering the development of a more open communication, easy and supportive feedback, and collaborative culture within teams, companies can be able to drive this DevOps culture. This mindset should come from within and outside of the organization by tapping into this sense of community-based collaboration. Communities are required because they ensure the well being of many of the technologies we use daily.

    Your favorite DevOps platforms—Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, Artifactory—and their popularity is because of the communities they have created around the tools. 

    A well-focused DevOps platform gives power to people who listen carefully to what the market is saying, gets the feedback and utilizes it effectively. Hence, community is a very important feature of a DevOps organization. 

    Conclusion

    Companies around the world are embracing DevOps, and the demand for DevOps skills soars as organizations spend their time and money on digital transformation. DevOps has become a modern approach to IT that helps companies to think and execute broader business strategies. DevOps can drive significant brand value by accelerating speed to market, better collaboration, ensuring better testing and automation. A DevOps platform should have all the qualities mentioned above to succeed in this highly competitive market.

  • Survey Finds IT More Challenging to Manage Than Ever

    Survey Finds IT More Challenging to Manage Than Ever

    A survey of 415 IT executives published today shows IT teams are struggling to keep up as the number of platforms that need to be managed continues to expand rapidly.

    Conducted by Propeller Insights on behalf of Volterra, a provider of a distributed computing platform, the survey finds 97% are planning to distribute workloads across two or more clouds. The top three reasons cited for adopting multiple clouds were the need to maximize availability and reliability (63%), meeting regulatory and compliance requirements (47%), and leveraging best-of-breed services from each provider (42%).

    At the same time, the survey finds 70% of survey respondents said it’s “very important” to have a consistent operational experience between the edge and public and private clouds.

    The survey, however, also makes it clear IT leaders understand that achieving the goal will be a significant challenge. The top issues identified when employing multiple clouds are establishing secure and reliable connectivity between providers (60%), employing different support and consulting processes (54%) and navigating different platform services (53%).

    The rise of edge computing is going to further exacerbate those challenges. The survey finds the difficulty in managing apps across multiple edge locations (44%) and an inability to accommodate the IT infrastructure needed to host and operate at the edge (38%) as the two major edge computing issues identified by survey respondents. In terms of specific technical challenges identified, integrating cloud-native workflows such as automation, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) and performance management (69%) and trouble installing a full set of application infrastructure spanning compute, storage and network and security (67%) top the list of issues.

    As far as lifecycle management at the edge is concerned, the two biggest long-term issues identified are the lack of resources or time to keep applications and infrastructure up to date (37%) and managing silos of distributed clusters (26%).

    Mark Weiner, chief marketing officer for Volterra, said the survey makes it clear there soon will come a day when IT organizations will need to centralize the management of an increasingly extended enterprise. IT organizations may have adopted public clouds aggressively, yet 70% to 80% of all workloads still run in an on-premises IT environment. At the same time, the number of workloads that will be distributed to edge computing platforms is set to explode. The survey identifies the primary reasons more workloads will be deployed on the edge as the need to control and analyze data locally (54%) and the amount of latency experienced when sending edge data to public cloud-based apps (47%).

    Ultimately, the goal is to have a hybrid cloud computing environment through which the management of IT is as centralized as possible. While the cost of deploying workloads in a public cloud is comparatively inexpensive, it turns out the total cost of IT continues to increase as IT teams find themselves managing more distributed platforms than ever. It may be a while before IT teams have the tools and processes in place to rein in those costs. However, at this point, it’s more a question of how and when that goal will be accomplished, not if.

    — Mike Vizard

  • JFrog Delivers on Hybrid Cloud Promise for DevOps

    JFrog Delivers on Hybrid Cloud Promise for DevOps

    JFrog announced the availability of what it claims to be the first available hybrid DevOps platform capable of spanning multiple clouds.

    Dror Bereznitsky, chief product officer for JFrog, said the JFrog Platform integrates a range of DevOps tools within the context of the continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platform that the company previously developed, with the goal of making it possible to continuously release software originating from any source on to any platform.

    Announced late last year, the JFrog Platform also provides DevOps teams with the first universal package manager with JFrog Artifactory along with support for both REST application programming interfaces (APIs) and a command line interface (CLI), he said.

    In addition, the JFrog Platform provides a common integrated user interface to access all capabilities and has been integrated with JFrog Pipelines for CI/CD, which is based on code JFrog gained via its acquisition of Shippable last year. The JFrog platform also enables DevOps teams to now also deploy applications on Kubernetes clusters.

    Finally, because the platform is managed by JFrog, DevOps teams can count on high availability and cybersecurity updates that are automatically delivered, said Bereznitsky.

    Bereznitsky said thanks to the rise of microservices based on containers and other cloud-native technologies, organizations are reaching a tipping point in terms of the amount of complexity their existing DevOps platforms can absorb. As such, many organizations that have already adopted a DevOps platform will be re-evaluating them. JFrog is betting that rather than spending more time on managing their underlying DevOps platform, more organizations will prefer to divert more resources to application development.

    It’s too early to say precisely how application development will evolve going forward. There is certainly an opportunity to centralize DevOps processes in a way that will make organizations more efficient. Most organizations today employ multiple platforms for building and deploying applications that often conspire to increase total costs unnecessarily. The challenge those organizations will face is overcoming the cultural issues it is likely to create within their organization.

    In the meantime, JFrog rivals clearly see the same opportunity. The race to become a de facto standard for building and deploying a new generation of highly portable applications is now on, at a time when many of the providers of DevOps tools are starting to consolidate. At the same time, the number of applications that will be deployed across an extended enterprise that now spans everything from public clouds to edge computing platforms soon will dramatically increase. As the volume of applications increases, the level of friction associated with building and deploying applications will ultimately determine the DevOps platform any organization is going to be inclined to standardize on.

    — Mike Vizard

  • HashiCorp Updates Terraform Tool for Azure Cloud

    HashiCorp Updates Terraform Tool for Azure Cloud

    HashiCorp today announced it has updated the instance of Terraform it created to automate the configuration of virtual machines on the Microsoft Azure cloud to give IT teams more granular control.

    Version 2.0. of Terraform (TF) AzureRM Provider will allow IT teams to separately configure virtual machines by type for instance of both Windows and Linux.

    In addition, version 2.0 of TF AzureRM Provider will allow users to specify custom timeouts for resources. Previously, timeouts were set for one hour by default.

    Finally, TF AzureRM Provider 2.0 removes resources, data sources and fields that have been deprecated. TF AzureRM Provider currently provides access to 374 resources and 119 data sources.

    Amith Nair, vice president of product marketing for HashiCorp, said the goal is to provide IT teams with a set of tools for automating the configuration of virtual machines on Azure that is more accessible than the tools currently provided by Microsoft.

    Nair said HashiCorp is seeing increased adoption of Microsoft Azure, which in turn creates demand for tools that make it easier to deploy virtual machines at scale. In fact, Nair notes that as more workloads move into the public cloud the less resistance there is to IT automation as administrators look for ways to manage IT at what is now unprecedented scale. Of course, many organizations gain their first experience with tools such as Terraform when they first embrace a set of best DevOps practices.

    Less clear is how many virtual machines are being configured on top of instances of Windows versus Linux. There is no doubt Microsoft has emerged as the strongest challenger to the dominance of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the public cloud. Much of that success, however, comes from the fact that Microsoft supports distributions of Linux alongside Windows Server on the Azure cloud. There are, of course, many organizations, such as Walmart, that prefer to standardize on Azure simply because they view Amazon to be a competitor. At the same time, however, there are many companies that employ both AWS and Azure.

    Nair said most organizations that have adopted more than one cloud tend to manage them in isolation from one another. However, it is expected that one day more organizations will seek to unify the management of multiple clouds within the context of a truly hybrid cloud computing environment as the total cost of cloud computing continues to rise with each additional workload deployed. Naturally, many of those organizations eventually will gravitate toward tools that can be employed across multiple clouds.

    In the meantime, whether it’s IT administrators or developers themselves configuring virtual machines in the cloud, it’s thanks to tools such as Terraform that the amount of time and effort required to set up virtual machines in the cloud is now as negligible as it is. The challenge now is not so much finding tools to automate IT as much as it is navigating all the cultural changes that naturally ensue.

    — Mike Vizard

  • vArmour CEO: Cloud Security Needs Simplicity

    vArmour CEO: Cloud Security Needs Simplicity

    Cloud computing promised cost savings and simplified IT management, among other things. In many ways, the cloud has lived up to its ideals, and in other ways, such as API security, shadow IT and the securing of clouds across hybrid environments, the cloud has proven challenging.

    To get a sense of how enterprises and security vendors are adapting, we reached out to Timothy Eades, CEO at cloud application security provider vArmour. vArmour was founded in 2011 with backing from Highland Capital Partners, Menlo Ventures, Citi Ventures, Work-Bench Ventures, Redline Capital and Telstra. Timothy Eades has been the CEO since 2013; prior to that role, he was the CEO at Silver Tail Systems.

    Here’s an edited version of our conversation.

    DevOps: How do you see cloud architectures evolving over the years ahead?

    Timothy Eades: There is considerable evolution coming. At vArmour, we have a philosophy about this: Bet on the road maps, not against them.

    I think we are seeing a lot of security vendors starting to scratch their heads and wonder: Where do we invent new security technologies that can help us differentiate? The road maps for winners are going to be those that bake security into their products. This way, cloud technology will only get stronger and more secure. If one imagines an x- and y-axis and the x-axis is the strength of security capability and the y-axis is simplicity, the vendor road maps, for those who will be successful, will be about getting that balance right.

    Currently, there’s considerable complexity involved when it comes to configuring and securing the public cloud. If you are Tim’s Pizzeria and you are running on AWS, it has to be made simple and more intuitive. I was talking to some friends recently about the Windows operating system and how everything has become so simple. But back in the day when you and I were growing up, we used to say “RTFM” almost daily. Nowadays, there is no manual.

    That’s mostly thanks to Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs came along and made everything so simple that it shouldn’t require a manual. The worst-case was it might require a YouTube video to understand.

    The cloud has to go through that same transition. Everything has to be made simpler, more intuitive. Otherwise, we are just going to get very weak configurations, because people are not going to configure it right. They’re not going to secure them right. They believe that they are inherently secure.

    DevOps: What do you think will be the catalyst that will continue to drive cloud vendors getting the simplicity and security balance right?

    Eades: I think it’s going to be a competition. I think the market sees the need for the drive to simplify. And it’s going to take the competition to get there. That’s a real battle between AWS, Azure, VMware and others. The good news is that VMware is going to embed a lot of security capabilities, and that will force Amazon, Azure, and Google Cloud to respond.

    DevOps: Cloud can get complicated quickly; even that small pizza shop may run a dozen cloud services.

    Eades: Yes, they are running a bunch of different services. The funny thing is, there is always a lack of security skills at play, too. And we all know that when businesses put things in the cloud, that they think it just became secure. They don’t have the skills to understand that it’s not as secure as they believe. I think the regulators are still scratching their heads a little bit about all of this because Amazon has been preaching its “shared responsibility” model. But, as we now know, it’s not shared liability.

    And people haven’t woken up yet to that fact, that shared responsibility is not shared liability.

    DevOps: How do you see enterprises consuming the various modalities of cloud in the years ahead, on-premises, public, private cloud and the different mixtures of each?

    Eades: It’s just amazing. Consider a company located in Europe. They have to have data on servers everywhere. So they’re using AWS and Azure and others. I think the large enterprises will continue to be hybrid cloud, but they won’t have a private data center. They just won’t.

    A friend of mine runs cloud security at a large bank in New York. Their current data center will be their last data center. They’re not going to build another data center. They’re just not.

    It’s the lifetime of the applications that they look at, and they wonder: Do I still want a data center? It doesn’t take long for them to get to “no.”

    One of the banks we worked with over the last three years, as they were moving many of their applications into the public cloud, they were trying to understand the interaction of their apps. They wanted to know how stable the performance of their apps is in the public cloud. They will tell you now that they don’t see the difference between their Amazon cloud and their private cloud. There’s no difference because they’ve all the bandwidth that they need.

    If you can’t tell the difference from a usage and from a financial perspective, more enterprises are going to depart from their data centers.

    I think you are going to see a very, very long tail of private data centers among very large enterprises, but the cloud will consume the rest of IT.

    — George V. Hulme

  • Automation Hacks for DevOps Teams

    Automation Hacks for DevOps Teams

    DevOps teams are expected to do more work in less time. They need to plan, test, build, secure and release applications at a fast-paced rate. Of course, the DevOps team needs to achieve all of this while maintaining high software quality. This is why automation is a crucial part of the DevOps workflow. The goal is to delegate repetitive tasks to the machine, and free up dev time for more complex jobs. 

    Below are some helpful automation hacks you can apply to boost the effectiveness of your DevOps practices.

    Automating Regulatory Compliance

    Properly managing regulatory compliance is vital for many organizations to avoid fines and operate legally. Although compliance standards vary by industry, most focus on ensuring privacy and confidentiality. To meet these standards, companies must secure data and prove they are taking the appropriate measures. This proof is commonly accomplished with the maintenance of a clear digital trail.

    You can use DevOps automation to log and store digital access trails for your protected data. You can also use automated testing and deployment to ensure that only code that passes compliance tests is deployed. This prevents compliance issues from being pushed to production and helps keep your data secure.

    Automating Development Environments

    DevOps workflows require frequent creation and elimination of environments, for testing, deployment and development. These environments can be created manually but it is more efficient to create environments automatically. This can be done using a golden image with your required configurations.

    Using standardized base images ensures that you are working with consistent environments and standardizes configurations and privileges. These images can be used for local or remote machines and can be initialized automatically.

    There are a variety of tools you can use to create and automate environment creation. Chef and Vagrant are two of the most popular. Both of these tools offer an accessible API and enable you to script automation using common languages and syntax.

    Automating Code Review

    Code review is an essential part of DevOps processes but it is also one of the lengthier and more tedious processes. Automation can help you perform this process more efficiently. Automatic code review works similarly to manual review except it is done using tools that integrate with development environments. These tools can check for styling, security, duplication, complexity and code coverage, and can auto-suggest corrections. Some popular tools for this automation include Codebeat, Code climate and Codacy.

    Automating File Synchronization and File Uploads

    Many DevOps and development teams use the public cloud for quickly spinning up development and test environments. However, what happens when the production environment, or other critical resources used in the dev/test process, are deployed on-premises? Having a fast, automated and reliable way to synchronize files between the on-premise data center and the cloud can save time and headaches.

    There are a few approaches to synchronize files:

    • Scripting file uploads and downloads. The most basic method is to use shell scripts and FTP or SFTP to upload and download files between local and cloud environments. However, this can be fragile, unreliable and difficult to scale.
    • Using APIs of cloud storage services. You can move data to and from the cloud using cloud storage APIs, such as the Amazon S3 API, the Box API or specialized hosting services such as Cloudinary.
    • Hybrid cloud. The ultimate solution is to create a hybrid cloud architecture where applications, developers and users view the local environment and the public cloud as one unit, and data is synchronized transparently in the background.

    Collaboration Tools for DevOps Teams

    There are a number of collaborative tools that teams can use to further boost gains from automation. These tools can help bridge gaps in automation and processes and ensure smooth workflows.

    Slack: a chat tool that DevOps teams can integrate with automation tooling. It includes features for segregating discussions by topic, team or purpose; uploading shared files and documents; and initiating or receiving alerts from automated processes via integrations.

    Jira: a tool that enables you to create and assign tasks. It includes features for scrum and kanban methodologies, unified reporting and backlog tracking. You can integrate it with many common DevOps tools, such as Jenkins.

    Trello: a cloud-based Kanban board tool. It enables you to create project boards that can be shared across teams to track project progress. Through integrations, you can automate the updating of cards or initiate processes when cards are manually moved.

    Asana: another cloud-based Kanban tool. Like Trello, it enables you to track and collaborate on projects across a team. Typically, when teams use tools such as Asana, they create multiple boards for different project aspects. These boards can then be viewed individually or from a central dashboard.

    Conclusion

    Hopefully, this article helped you figure out how to leverage automation for improved efficiency. There are many automation options for DevOps, including automated regulatory compliance, automated infrastructure, automated code review and automated file synchronization.

    For DevOps project management, you can use collaboration tools such as Slack, Jira, Trello and Asana. Remember to make sure that any tool you introduce can be simply and easily integrated into your current environment. The tools of your choice also need to fit the skillset of all collaborators. For ease of use, keep your tooling ecosystem simple and minimalistic.

    — Gilad David Maayan

  • Never Ignore the E-Factor

    Never Ignore the E-Factor

    When cloud burst upon the scene, we were treated to wild-eyed prognosticators telling us about the death of the traditional data center. This is a trend in IT that you would think we’d learn from, but we repeat every couple of years. 4GLs, no, XML, no…Were all going to end development, and yet here we are, with more lines of code and more programming languages in use. It just keeps happening.

    These all share two common failings. First, technology in use today may not be perfect, but it is getting the job done, so dumping it for the new silver bullet is an unlikely result either in the long or the short term. For example, we’re many iterations beyond the conception of the C programming language, and yet for some purposes it is still going strong–because it does the job.

    But that’s a little tangential to today’s discussion. Today, the other failing is where I’d like to focus. The E-Factor.

    Enterprises are a lot of things, but one of the things the successful ones are not is careless. Cloud use in the enterprise was always going to be both multi-cloud and hybrid. Why? Multi-cloud because sole supplier arrangements are riddled with possible issues, and hybrid because every enterprise has something they want to maintain sole control of or something that simply can’t be moved but they want to push toward newer environments.

    We were always going to have multiple choices, and successful enterprises were always going to use multiple of them. Containers facilitate this truth a lot. The ability to run containers pretty much anywhere makes them portable, as long as staff is familiar with the infrastructure of a given environment so they can support the container management system in that environment. But even without containers, a cloud portability solution was inevitable.

    There is a massive amount of automation going into IT right now, all for the good. Freeing up traditionally scarce IT hours to focus on more and better services is all to the positive. Inevitably, one or more of these automation tools will be hailed as “The End of X.” Ignore them, and keep rocking at your job. AIOps seems most likely to gather this type of following right now. It will offer a flood of new data and consolidated views of that data, but not much else in the near term. Even when decisions start to be automated, full-on automation based upon AIOps feedback still needs code to run against and infrastructure to run on, so no doom and gloom there.

    Apply the E-Factor to anything hailed as a silver bullet. If you’ve worked in the enterprise, you know there are so many variables in the datacenter that any silver bullet would have to be a splintering round, each splinter behaving in a completely different manner to address current IT needs. More options are always good, and I, for one, go after new tech because I’m non-stop curious. But it is indeed just more options for your IT needs. Use the ones that will help, ditch the ones that make things worse and ignore the cheering “This time we mean it!” crowd.

    — Don Macvittie

  • PagerDuty Focuses Incident Response Efforts on the Cloud

    PagerDuty Focuses Incident Response Efforts on the Cloud

    After helping to pioneer the adoption of incident management software in on-premises IT environments, PagerDuty is now focusing its attention on the cloud with the launch of PagerDuty for Cloud Operations.

    Jukka Alanen, senior vice president of business development and corporate strategy for PagerDuty, said that as cloud computing evolves to include containers and serverless computing frameworks, it’s becoming apparent that managing IT incidents on public clouds is fundamentally different than on-premises IT environments. As such, demand for incident management platforms optimized for specific cloud platforms is increasing, he said.

    PagerDuty initially will focus its efforts on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform because that’s where most of the initial demand is coming from, Alanen noted. As part of that effort, an instance of the PagerDuty digital operations management platform running on AWS has been integrated with Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Personal Health Dashboard, Amazon EventBridge, AWS Security Hub, Amazon GuardDuty and AWS CloudTrail cloud services.

    Rather than replace all the capabilities already being provided by cloud service providers, Alanen said PagerDuty is committed to making them more accessible within the context of an incident management platform. With the rise of DevOps, the types of IT professionals who need to be able to access an incident management platform in the cloud era is also expanding. To resolve issues as quickly as possible, Alanen said it’s more critical than ever to make sure the right problems are being presented to the right teams within an IT organization.

    In terms of making that transition, however, IT organizations are all over the map. Many are trying to extend existing IT operations processes developed for on-premises IT environments. To the extent that organizations are essentially lifting and shifting monolithic applications running on-premises into a public cloud, that approach is feasible. However, once organizations also begin deploying cloud-native applications based on microservices and serverless computing frameworks, most will need to rely more on management and monitoring tools provided by cloud service providers.

    The next challenge then becomes defining workflows that automate responses to potential service disruptions or a security breach. At the same time, many organizations are adopting best DevOps practices that shift responsibility of many aspects of incident response on to the shoulders of developers who now need access to an incident management platform. The existing reactive approach to managing IT needs to be replaced with a proactive approach that automates responses to incidents whenever possible, Alanen said.

    To help organizations accelerate their move down that path, PagerDuty has crafted a Digital Operations Maturity Model, which provides benchmarking data and best practices for organizations looking to modernize their IT operations as part of a larger transition to increased reliance on automated workflow processes.

    Of course, once IT organizations define these workflows it won’t take long before IT organizations find themselves needing to extend more proactive approaches to incident management across multiple cloud computing environments. The challenge then becomes finding a way to weave all the application programming interfaces (APIs) and services exposed by multiple cloud service providers into what one day will become a truly hybrid cloud computing environment.

    — Mike Vizard