The DevOps team that receives the greenlight to shift its CI/CD processes and operations to a cloud native environment realizes that the journey can be fraught with peril. Despite the cloud native “pot of gold” — represented by increased agility, faster software release cadences and more stable deployments — things can quickly go sour.
During NS1’s INS1GHTS2020 virtual summit, Jonathan Sullivan, NS1 chief technology officer and co-founder, said during his keynote that organizations seeking to modernize their infrastructure by migrating to the cloud and taking advantage of the opportunities microservices and container environments offer “are creating a foundation for the future of their company.”
Businesses are going to be more resilient and prepared for the inevitable continued evolution of technology as “software continues to take everything,” he said.
However, the migrations to cloud environments with containerized and microservices environments is also never easy, of course. “A digital transformation used to involve “migrating to the cloud” and determining “what that meant for your business, Sullivan said. “What we’re finding today is that everything is a lot more complicated than that,” he said.
In this post, drawing from the talks and keynotes from NS1’s virtual summit and other sources, we look at some of the pitfalls organizations can avoid as they make the shift to cloud native environments.
Don’t Go Into that Cloud Alone
The idea, of course, is to help support DevOps’s key mission to securely develop and deploy software while spending less time and fewer resources managing the more operations-related tasks, by relying on cloud providers such as Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure. However, the tool-selection process to bridge the gap when shifting from on-premises to cloud environments represents a major challenge for many organizations.
“The process is never going to get simplified down to, ‘we’re going to be able to migrate everything away on-premises and read the playbook and put it into one cloud,’” Sullivan said at the INS1GHTS2020 Fireside Chat session.
DevOps must, for example, find the right “modern application delivery stack services in order to take advantage and leverage the investments you’ve made,” Sullivan said. “Without that, you can have this fantastic hybrid cloud strategy and if you have no way of intelligently orchestrating traffic across that, you’re just not going to see the ROI,” Sullivan said.
It is necessary when migrating to a containerized Kubernetes environment to invest in frameworks such as VMware’s Tanzu. This allows DevOps “to put your stuff anywhere and just figure out how to make use of this complex infrastructure and complex substrates,” Sullivan said.
Ultimately, the shift thus requires “intelligent orchestration, good integration along the whole DevOps stream,” strong monitoring and management of the platform and automated updates, patching and error remediation, Clive Longbottom, an analyst for Clive Longbottom and Associates, said.
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