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Tag: hybrid IT environment

  • DevOps for the Development and Delivery of High-Performance Applications

    DevOps for the Development and Delivery of High-Performance Applications

    Engineering teams that successfully implement DevOps practices often deliver software with higher business value. These organizations can easily identify areas where problematic code exists, quickly eliminate issues and deliver high-performance applications more quickly than their competitors that use traditional delivery methodologies. DevOps practitioners understand that creating an efficient model for performance testing goes hand-in-hand with four key objectives of digital transformation: extending performance testing to new roles; integration into continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) processes; end-to-end performance monitoring; and continuous optimization.

    Reduce Cycle Time and Time to Market

    In order to meet the requirements of rapid, high-quality application delivery, modern software teams need an approach that goes beyond conventional performance testing. This is where DevOps-centric approaches can provide faster, more efficient development and help ensure the delivery of high-quality software. Building the components of an application using agile approaches and validating features as they are created ensures that applications can be tested and verified more quickly, with no increase in associated costs or resources.

    By adopting DevOps practices, individual steps within the application delivery process can be automated as part of a DevOps tool-chain. For example, automating quality assurance test runs can eliminate – or significantly reduce – time-consuming human or analog searches for defects in code. Test automation can lead to an increased volume and expanded scope of testing, which, in turn, leads to a reduction in the defect escape rate. That saves resources, time and money.

    Shift Left to Increase Agility

    To mitigate performance errors and to address issues as early as possible in the application delivery cycle, tests should be executed during the build stage of the development process. By shifting left – running the tests as early as possible, ideally as part of a code commit – enterprises reduce the risk of discovering defects or issues with the product after significant amounts of development work have been completed. It is widely accepted that addressing defects later in development cycles takes significantly more time and money versus identifying and remediating defects early in the development cycle.

    As developers perform rapid, high quality, incremental changes, business analysts or product owners can more easily share changes, concepts or suggestions with their development teams. This continuous flow of communication can significantly reduce feedback time, increasing an organization’s ability to react to changing market requirements and allowing a level of flexibility within the development process that drives competitive advantage.

    DevOps in a Hybrid Landscape

    By supporting a wide range of tools and technologies, organizations that adopt DevOps practices can support applications that run in a local network environment, in cloud-based environments or, more commonly, in hybrid IT environments. As companies continue cloud migrations and transformations, well-designed DevOps tools can help simplify this transition while continuing to provide support for the legacy applications that provide core capabilities and processing for many enterprises. These hybrid tools are fully integrated into existing application development processes, allowing all application delivery teams to successfully transition to DevOps-centric practices without leaving any teams behind.

    One particularly important DevOps practice is performance optimization through continuous analysis. By using a centralized store and a common approach for quality-centric data collation, this practice helps analyze, enforce and improve the connections between software developer, CI Build and end-to-end performance testing to ensure a “quality first” mentality and higher-value delivery outcomes. The application of data visualization techniques allows teams to access code – build – test results in real-time and make decisions based on up-to-date insights.

    If DevOps practices are successfully established within a team or organization, they not only support more efficient software development and delivery but also are cost-effective. However, in order to successfully implement DevOps practices, enterprises need to understand and implement both technological and cultural changes. Through a combination of process, tooling and cultural simplification, and aligning teams toward common business objectives, organizations can deliver their end goal of creating high-quality, high-value software that satisfies the needs of the end user. By focusing on the common goal, and understanding the journey necessary to get there, enterprises can do so more quickly and at less cost – a win-win!

  • Arrcus Expands Network Services Spanning Hybrid Clouds

    Arrcus Expands Network Services Spanning Hybrid Clouds

    Arrcus has added virtualized distributed routing (VDR) and multi-cloud networking (MCN) capabilities to ArcOS, a network operating system (NOS) that can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud.

    Company CEO Devesh Garg said these additional capabilities provide the programmatic network services that IT organizations require to foster deployments of hybrid cloud computing environments.

    Arrcus MCN provides the ability to securely connect workloads and data across any cloud, while VDR eliminates the need to rely on physical routers that require their own chassis, he said.

    Arrcus has been making the case for a disaggregated approach to networking that eliminates dependencies on physical infrastructure. Instead, IT teams can deploy ArcOS on a cloud service or any white-box appliance they choose in an on-premises IT environment. That approach eliminates the possibility of becoming locked into specific network hardware platforms, he said.

    Garg added it also provides DevOps teams with a consistent foundation on which to deploy distributed applications. Rather than having to navigate different NOSes running in the cloud and on-premises IT environments, ArcOS presents a consistent set of application programming interfaces (APIs) for accessing network services.

    In fact, the need to programmatically invoke those network services is what’s driving the convergence of network operations and DevOps teams, he noted. As applications become more distributed in the age of the cloud, IT organizations are looking for more efficient ways to expose network services on-demand.

    That convergence, however, will take time. Many networking teams still tend to prefer to acquire routers and switches as physical devices that include a NOS rather than deploying an operating system on infrastructure they select and manage. However, as DevOps teams continue to push for access to network services that can more easily scale up and down as required, it’s now only a matter of time before software-defined networking services become a default requirement.

    In fact, Garg said, the rise of microservices will force that issue as DevOps teams look to deploy applications that will be updated frequently.

    In addition, he noted, the rise of edge computing platforms and 5G wireless networking services will simultaneously push organizations toward virtualized network services.

    It’s not clear at what rate network services are being transformed. Software-defined networking services are already readily available in the cloud. Progress in on-premises IT environments has been tied to the willingness of IT organizations to fund upgrades to core network infrastructure. The challenge many IT organizations now face in the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic is finding a way to achieve that goal cost-effectively. White-boxes provide a less costly alternative to switches from vendors such as Cisco Systems and Arista Networks. At the same time, the total cost of delivering network services across a hybrid cloud computing environment can decline when a common NOS is employed across all platforms.

    Regardless of the path forward, the one thing that is certain is legacy network infrastructure has become a major bottleneck at a time when IT organizations need to be more agile than ever.

  • CloudBolt Acquires SovLabs to Advance Hybrid Cloud Strategy

    CloudBolt Acquires SovLabs to Advance Hybrid Cloud Strategy

    CloudBolt Software this week announced it has acquired SovLabs, a provider of a framework that extends the reach of automation frameworks from VMware.

    Company CEO Jeff Kukowski said that as a provider of a cloud management platform, the SovLabs framework will extend CloudBolt’s reach deeper into VMware environments that have already invested in automation tools from VMware.

    As IT environments become more widely distributed across a range of platforms, demand for a platform that enables IT teams to centralize the management of multiple cloud computing environments has increased, Kukowski said. The addition of SovLabs to the CloudBolt portfolio will make it easier to bridge the divide between cloud computing platforms and enterprise on-premises IT environments that have standardized on VMware.

    CloudBolt has been making a consistent effort to enable IT teams to invoke its cloud management framework via whichever IT automation framework they have adopted, including tools such as Terraform. The goal is to reduce the need for IT organizations to rely on their own custom-built code to achieve that goal, said Kukowski.

    In general, many IT organizations are now investing more heavily in centralizing the management of multiple IT environments as part of an effort to reduce the total cost of IT in the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. That shift is accelerating a transition to hybrid cloud computing models that require increased reliance on IT automation.

    The challenge many organizations face is enterprise IT environments tend to have many islands of IT automation in place. CloudBolt is pursuing a strategy that enables IT teams to extend those islands of automation or access CloudBolt directly to manage hybrid cloud computing environments.

    The CloudBolt approach offers IT teams an alternative to relying on a single platform vendor to achieve hybrid cloud computing. VMware, for example, has been making a case for deploying VMware vSphere on multiple clouds versus relying on the virtual machines provided by a cloud service provider. Most of the large cloud service providers are simultaneously pushing to deploy instances of their platforms in on-premises IT environments that can be managed as an extension of a public cloud.

    It’s too early to say how this titanic battle for control over hybrid cloud computing will play out. CloudBolt, however, is betting that rather than getting locked into a single platform, many IT organizations will prefer to run toward some neutral ground to deploy a control plane capable of managing multiple clouds and on-premises IT environments.

    Of course, CloudBolt is not the only provider of a cloud management platform making this case. Competition between providers of hybrid cloud management platforms is heating up as interest in hybrid cloud computing starts to move beyond the theoretical. Regardless of the path forward chosen, history would suggest that most IT organizations in the months ahead will be seeking more control over their IT environments.

  • Survey: Internal IT Teams Embrace ‘DevOps Inspired’ Processes

    Survey: Internal IT Teams Embrace ‘DevOps Inspired’ Processes

    The “2020 State of Application Services” survey published today by F5 Networks suggests more IT organizations than ever are adopting some elements of DevOps principles to manage an increasingly diverse application portfolio.

    Based on a global survey of 2,600 IT professionals, the report finds 63% of organizations still place primary responsibility for application services within IT operations. However, more than half the organizations surveyed said they are moving toward “DevOps-inspired” teams. In addition, 73% of respondents said their organizations are automating network operations to boost efficiency.

    Lori MacVittie, principal technical evangelist for F5 Networks, said the report makes it clear many IT organizations are trying to adopt best DevOps practices gradually. They may in some cases set up dedicated DevOps teams, but the preference long-term is trending toward a more evolutionary transition, she said.

    At the same time, application environments are becoming more complex at a faster rate. The survey finds three-tier web and mobile application architectures come are most common (40%), followed by client-server applications (34%), microservices/cloud-native applications (15%) and mainframe monolithic applications (11%). The survey also finds 87% of organizations are using multiple clouds, but only 27% of respondents will have more than half of their applications in the cloud by the end of 2020. It’s also worth noting less than half the applications being managed (45%) are external-facing.

    In terms of application services deployed today, the most common are SSL VPN and security services such as firewall, IPS/IDS, antivirus and spam mitigation, followed by load balancing, global server load balancing and DNS and web application firewall (WAF) and distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection. In the next 12 months, however, software-defined wide area networks (SD-WANs) take the top slot at 41%, followed by DNSSEC (37%) and service mesh (37%). Botnet protection, anti-fraud and common performance optimization services fill out the top six, with 36% of organizations planning to deploy each.

    MacVittie said the survey results make it clear IT organizations will find themselves having to cope with more complex IT environments for years to come, with the most intense pressure being on cybersecurity. The survey finds 71% of organizations admit to having a skills gap in security.

    Overall, 62% of respondents said they are confident in their ability to protect applications in an on-premises data center. However, only 45% of respondents said the same for applications residing in public clouds.

    The study also suggests there is a strong link between organizations that have embraced digital business transformation and the need to build and deploy applications faster. A total of 80% of respondents said their organizations are executing on some form of digital transformation.

    However, as organizations make that transition, it is apparent IT teams are challenged by the need to be more responsive to the business, said MacVittie. The day is coming to an end when IT could operate as a utility that was managed by open and closing tickets as regimented tasks were completed. IT teams need to embrace DevOps to respond faster to rapidly changing business conditions, she said.

    It’s unclear how long it may take for best DevOps practices to be absorbed across mainstream IT teams. However, the one thing that is clear is that many of the DevOps concepts associated with ruthlessly automating IT in the name of agility are finally starting to hit home.

    — Mike Vizard