Deploying applications in the cloud is no easy task. In this free whitepaper, Senior Systems Engineer Scott Sumner addresses the challenges of deploying applications in the cloud, the gaps in current cloud management tools and the best solution for standardizing deployments across the enterprise.
Challenges of Deployment within the Cloud
Deploying applications in the cloud is a complex and intricate process. If you don’t employ standards and best practices, continuous integration can result in complete chaos and anarchy. Various teams could deploy as they saw fit for their own needs and create a mess of the configurations and processes. Many enterprises have opted for either centralized teams or a self-service approach for handling deployments in the cloud.
- Centralized Team – This team is responsible for scheduling, coordinating and handling the deployments requested by various development teams.
- Self-Service – Development teams can do their own deployments on demand without waiting for other groups to setup the environment.
Gaps of Cloud Management Tools
Cloud providers are always talking about the infrastructure they can put in place to achieve a dynamic, auto-scaling on-demand, virtual machine ‘surface’ to install your applications. They provide infrastructure management tools but that is where their responsibility ends. Something else is needed to manage your application on top of the cloud infrastructure.
There are a number of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools which play an integral role in agile development. These include source code and artifact repositories, build, configuration and change management tools. Yet again, cloud management tools have no integration with ALM tools as their focus is on the infrastructure and not the application.
The Solution
We’ve established that deploying applications within the cloud is a complex and detailed process. We’ve also discussed why existing tools for cloud management don’t really cut it. What is needed is a comprehensive application-centric solution that can address these challenges to enable continuous integration and agile development in the cloud.
Click here to download the free whitepaper ‘Streamlining Deployments in the Cloud’