“Everyone wants to be in the cloud” according to the author of the blog Horovits, but not everyone knows how to do it, especially when legacy applications are involved. The author discusses how a gradual shift to cloud both mitigates risk and enables you to enjoy the immediate benefits of automation as well as easier management of your application release operations.
Application Release Automation in the Cloud
Experts say automated application deployment tools are a requirement when hosting an application in the cloud. Once automation is in place, and given a PaaS layer that abstracts the underlying IaaS, your application can easily be migrated to any common cloud provider with minimal effort.
Furthermore, automation has a value in its own right. The emerging agile movements such as Agile ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) andDevOps endorse automation as a means to support the Continuous Deployment methodology and ever-increasing frequency of releases to multiple environments. Some even go beyond DevOps and as far asNoOps. Forrester analyst Mike Gualtieri states that “NoOps is the peak of DevOps”, where “DevOps Is About Collaboration; NoOps Is About Automation“:
DevOps is a noble and necessary movement for immature organizations. Mature organizations have DevOps down pat. They aspire to automate to speed release increments.
This value of automation in providing a more robust and agile management of your application is a no-brainer and will prove useful even before migrating to the cloud. It is also much easier to test and verify the automation when staying in the well-familiar environment in which the system has been working until now. Once deciding to migrate to the cloud, automation will make the process much simpler and smoother.
Transitioning applications to the cloud does not have to be a painful and high-risk process. It can be done gradually to mitigate risk. The first step is automation. Automating your application’s management within your existing environment is a no-brainer and has its own value in making your application deployment, management and monitoring easier and more robust.
Once automation of the full application life cycle is in place, migrating your application to the cloud becomes smooth sailing.
Above are select excerpts from the blog ‘Cloud Deployment: It’s All About Cloud Automation’. Click here to read the full blog on Horovits.
Pingback: Streamlining Deployments in the Cloud