The rise of cloud centers for excellence:

Cloud is a hotbed for innovation. Considering the rapid innovation which the cloud enables, it is not surprising then that according to Sirius Decisions 78% of organizations have adopted agile methods for product development. More often, organizations have specialized cloud centers for excellence, or cloud COE, consisting of cloud experts from cross-functional disciplines such as cloud services, cloud architecture, IT operations, security, and compliance. Cloud COE must define solution requirements, optimize processes and manage daily cloud operations which enable this agility, and therein lay the challenge.

What’s Different?

Here’s what cloud computing brings to the table that makes CloudOps different. Cloud-based platforms are:

• Able to scale out: You can expand capacity at any time. Cloud lets you auto- provision servers. This feature adds great value but can be a challenge to manage.
• Distributed and stateless: Operations must adjust to management that could span the world.
• Infrastructure Agnostic: Clouds can abstract the underlying infrastructure from the platform and applications.
• Location Transparent: Location should be managed consistently.
• Latency tolerant: Latency can vary a great deal, and you’ll need to operate and manage clouds using the same attribute.
• Loosely Coupled: Clouds run applications that share common services but aren’t bound together.
• Data that is shared, replicated and distributed: Data isn’t centrally located and is either physically or logically separated. CloudOps relies on continuous operations. This is the approach to operations that are emerging from best practices around DevOps. Continuous operations have the ability to run cloud-based systems in such a way that it can help to attain a zero-downtime goal.

A matter of abstraction:

The ability to set up redundant systems is only part of the CloudOps battle. The real action is in the cloud’s ability to place these systems behind a layer of management software. There are two flavors of these tools:

Cloud Management Platform (CMP) tools: This lets you manage cloud services, provision, and de-provision services since you can place a layer of automation around cloud-based machine instances and cloud services.

System failures can be worked around automatically. Also, when the software is updated, automated processes that are typically linked with automated DevOps processes are able to test, stage and deploy software updates without interruption in application services.

Metrics and monitoring systems tools: The idea is to proactively protect spot issues when they arise in the operations of cloud-based systems. These tools constantly gather data that are reflective in the current state of the system.

CloudOps is not about what tools you buy. It’s about how you use them and the procedures, processes you place around them. Many enterprises fool themselves into thinking that a new technology or tool will deliver CloudOps capabilities, but that’s only a small fraction which you need.

The idea is to have continuous operations as the end state of continuous development, testing, deployment and so on which means we are moving towards a streamlined way of building and deploying software. CloudOps is nothing more than the migration of continuous operations into the world of cloud computing. To know more about cloud migration and services contact TechNEXA Technologies from our contact page.