Earlier this week, I posted a blog about how cloud is a corporate strategy, not a tactical solution. Today, I would like to take the opportunity to discuss how DevOps supports the transition to the cloud and how this new paradigm differs from virtualization. Credit for this blog is due to Brian Jawalka, guest contributor to the TechRepublic.
The cloud demands DevOps
Some enterprises fall into the trap of treating the cloud exactly like they handle virtualization. This approach treats the cloud like a large, virtualized data center that runs apps on cloud-based VMs.
True adoption of the cloud means changing the way you design, build, and evolve applications to take advantage of what the cloud does differently from data centers, whether virtualized or not. In other words, true cloud adoption involves adopting DevOps.
DevOps is about increasing innovation while maintaining the highest standard of operational quality. In the DevOps world, application developers and operations experts are on the same team. In the traditional data center, development and operations experts are often on separate teams.
But in the cloud, the entire stack of resources, from storage to networking to servers, can become virtualized and configurable as services. IT Operations can manage the entire spectrum of resources an application consumes. An application could be served by databases, storage, networking and servers distributed across several clouds, or a combination of cloud-based and on-premise hardware. The cloud gives IT Operations fine-grained control over resource consumption-if an application needs more computing power, it can be scaled up or down dynamically. If an application needs access to a new database, storage, or load-balancing technology in order to enable mobile capabilities, the design of that app needs to offer the flexibility to add those services. The low cost of public cloud resources allows entirely new infrastructures to be built, even to do continuous deployment, instead of just minor changes to a legacy system. The on-demand, self-service nature of the cloud, combined with its flexibility and scalability, changes the game for consuming infrastructure and deploying applications.
According to Mr. Jawalka, not every application can or should move to the cloud. There are limits to what should migrate. But if you are approaching the cloud without thinking about DevOps-meaning without thinking about how your IT organization could redesign itself, as well as its applications – you are only getting a fraction of the value of the cloud.
How do you think the cloud can best be utilized? Share your thoughts in the comment section.
Click here to read the full article on the Tech Republic
Click here to read ‘Cloud is a strategy, Not a Solition’