devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: VDI

  • Empowering DevOps With Cloud Desktops

    Empowering DevOps With Cloud Desktops

    Today’s organizations need to enable their IT teams to rapidly deploy, manage and maintain their applications and services. This is a primary driver behind the growth in adoption of DevOps. By uniting the IT operations and software development teams, organizations are helping to provide continuous delivery and accelerating the systems development life cycle.

    At the same time, the chronic cyberskills shortage makes it hard for organizations to find the talent they need to hire and collaborate with. The cloud, and specifically cloud desktops, can address many of these challenges and help organizations get the most bang for their buck when it comes to their DevOps teams. In fact, the two technologies have a symbiotic relationship.

    DevOps Hiring Challenges

    Due to the shortage of individuals with key skills, organizations are facing a significant challenge these days as they try to find the right developers. In fact, a recent report by the Linux Foundation and edX finds organizations are searching for more people with open source DevOps skills (65%) than developers (59%) for the first time.

    It is possible, in some instances, to hire remotely, but there are potential snags. For instance, hiring people in another country will likely entail a visa process that can take several months to complete. And collaboration with external project partners can create project bottlenecks that inhibit productivity.

    Once the people you need have been hired, the onboarding process begins. Getting new hires settled in a workflow and procuring and shipping the laptops or workstations they need takes at least a couple more weeks before they can even begin to become productive. But organizations want to be able to hire developers anywhere they can find the right people and they need them to be productive within hours, not weeks or months.

    Collaboration Woes

    DevOps teams cannot function without collaboration, but this, too, can be difficult – particularly if those teams are geographically dispersed. Developer teams have attempted to solve this problem by adopting a variety of technologies, such as legacy VDI solutions, VPNs for remote work, physical workstations connected over a WAN and more. These technologies have helped solve some of the problems, but they’ve also introduced a host of other issues that negatively affect productivity and increase cost and complexity. That includes lack of performance, unreliable user experience, IP security concerns and data management problems.

    Cloud Desktops: A New Approach

    In light of all that isn’t working, it’s clear that a new approach is needed. Cloud desktops offer many advantages when it comes to addressing some of the key challenges DevOps teams face. For one thing, they make onboarding much easier. By using cloud desktops and workstations, all that the new, talented software developer needs is a device and an internet connection, and they instantly become a part of the development team. This resolves another headache that consumes unnecessary IT resources.

    Shipping and hardware preferences are no longer an issue with the cloud desktop model. There is no more shipping, no more maintenance overhead, no more Windows-versus-Mac debates. Now, developers can pick the device they want, depending on their role requirements. They can even use smartphones and tablets in docking stations instead of laptops to connect and work in the fully configured and secure cloud desktops.

    Benefits for Developers and Testers

    Because cloud desktops support multiple desktop images, they are ideal for DevOps teams. For developers, this means that they can have multiple desktops, all with differing versions, all kept separate. This is great news if you don’t want to have to keep reimaging a physical device.

    Giving a developer a persistent desktop is one option that cloud desktops enable. Another option is the ability to give the developer a brand-new, “clean” cloud desktop every day (non-persistent). For enterprises, this means they can control the developers’ IDE so code leaks don’t happen from one release to the next, intellectual property is better protected and they can enforce stronger overall data security.

    Testers benefit as well, as they know they’ll have a totally clean, brand-new cloud desktop every day. This allows them to test and test again in isolation, knowing nothing was left behind from a previous test. In addition, the right cloud desktop enables anytime, anyplace collaboration; geographic limits become a thing of the past.

    Empowering DevOps

    The speed and agility of DevOps have made it a mainstay of software development, but certain criteria must be met for it to succeed. Its premise is faster delivery times, but companies cannot provide continuous delivery if they don’t have the skilled DevOps talent they need. Once they’re recruited and hired, provisioning often takes up more valuable time.

    With the clock ticking, organizations need to select skilled individuals, regardless of their location, and get them working and collaborating as quickly as possible. Cloud desktops address both of these challenges. In addition, they improve the user experience compared to typical VDI solutions – even for compute-heavy users. Cloud desktops increase time-to-productivity, too. As you equip and add to your DevOps team, consider the benefits of adding cloud desktops to the mix.

  • Citrix Makes Case for VPN Alternative

    Citrix Makes Case for VPN Alternative

    Citrix this week announced it will make its remote access tool that enables users to efficiently access their desktop PCs more widely available via the cloud.

    Gabe Carrejo, senior program manager for Citrix, said Remote PC Access provides a more efficient alternative to the virtual private networks (VPNs) that most organizations currently rely on to enable employees to remotely access their desktops.

    To use Remote PC Access, an IT administrator installs a small client on the remote systems. The client provides access to a range of networking services that Citrix makes available on top of its Independent Computing Architecture (ICA) remoting protocol to create a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) tunnel, which Citrix markets collectively as High-Definition Experience (HDX) Technology.

    To make it easier to access a desktop PC remotely, Remote PC Access installs agent software that IT teams can now push out to an endpoint as long as they have licensed any one of several Citrix services, said Carrejo. In most cases, IT teams will employ a platform such as Microsoft System Center to deploy agent software on an endpoint.

    In the rush to provide employees with remote access almost overnight to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations turned to VPN offerings they were using to provide a small number of employees with remote access. However, with almost every employee trying to access the same VPN, many of those IT teams have encountered network bandwidth issues. What’s more, many of the desktop applications installed in the office are not especially tolerant of the latency a VPN adds to the equation.

    Citrix has long been making the case for ICA as a more efficient protocol for providing remote access to desktops. Now, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the company is making it easier for IT teams to distribute HDX agent software across as many remote endpoints an IT organization needs to support. End users can then access applications on their office desktops remotely via any HTML5-compatible browser or virtual desktop software provided by Citrix.

    Carrejo said more organizations are re-evaluating their reliance on VPNs as it becomes clear that what once viewed as business disruption has become the “new normal.” Many organizations are looking closely at how many employees they need to come into an office when their job role may not require it. Remote computing is now a core element of a larger business continuity strategy. As such, Carrejo said many organizations are looking to find a way to provide more efficient remote access to office-based desktop systems while contemplating a possible transition to a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) platform deployed in a local data canter or in the cloud.

    It’s too early to say to what degree Windows desktops will be moving to VDI platforms. In the meantime, however, the remote access protocols that IT teams rely on suddenly matter a lot more.