Why DevOps needs to be part of enterprise cloud adoption

“To cloud or not to cloud” was once the question enterprise IT departments asked themselves. The landscape has changed since then.

With all the talk of the unicorns’ success with their born-in-the-cloud applications, enterprise organizations are looking to transform and compete. They can no longer afford to ask if they should move to the cloud, but rather how they’re going to do so.

The reality is that a hybrid approach to cloud adoption is going to make the most sense for enterprises, as it enables them to develop services on their own and consume services they can’t otherwise create.

But this is not as simple as it sounds. Adoption of hybrid cloud requires a complete shift in how IT operates. This is why enterprises adopting the cloud should be looking into DevOps.

How to get the most out of the hybrid cloud

To stay competitive with cloud offerings and to take full advantage of the cloud, your IT department must transform into a services provider.

Every decision that IT and the business agree on should revolve around services. What services do we want to create and provide? What services do we want to consume and build upon? The answers to these questions will help drive your strategy for transformation.

But to accomplish this, your organization must move to a level of automation internally that allows for the same functionality that cloud providers offer with all their services. Automation is the key to taking full advantage of what you’re going to do in the cloud.

The best practices in the cloud require you to be just as agile with your deployment methodologies as you are with the consumption of those resources. Therefore, IT must automate the rules and requirements for operating in a production environment so they can control and manage the services as they’re consumed in the public cloud.

Failing to do so is how you end up with rogue employees spinning up their own solutions in the public cloud because they don’t have the same level of self-service agility from the services provided by IT.

One of the enablers of this move to a services model is the adoption of DevOps.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a way of developing and deploying applications into the cloud. It involves transforming your internal IT using the agile development model.

This continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) methodology provides the tooling that development teams need to automate application deployments from development all the way through to production.

To automate the end-to-end deployment of an application, you need to evaluate your existing business processes. By reviewing your current manual processes, you will undoubtedly uncover inefficiencies and add to the overall benefits.

The benefits of adopting DevOps

Adopting the DevOps framework will drive a new way of doing business, allowing for a more measurable approach to delivering outcomes.

This model enables you to focus on building pipelines to manage all aspects of an application deployment. Aside from standardizing your DevOps and DevSecOps, using a pipeline deployment model also lets you:

• Build repeatable rules into your code for security and governance
• Scale via automation
• Automate testing into all new code deployments
• Automate phased deployments of new releases

With the ability to fail fast and recover just as fast, the DevOps pipeline framework enables you to rapidly test, deploy, and innovate. It’s also a great way to ensure that code is validated before being presented to your end users. The pipeline can be a gated entry point to your production environments, ensuring adequate testing has been completed prior to deployment.

While leveraging a pipeline to deploy current applications, including greenfield cloud-native applications, is beneficial, leveraging a full DevOps model when moving to the cloud will yield the most business value and security enablement.

Understanding the technical requirements and tooling to deliver the DevOps framework will move the needle, but the cultural changes needed to adopt a DevOps transformation are much more difficult to achieve. There is no silver bullet. But taking the time to understand the benefits will justify the effort.

To learn more about driving your cloud adoption, visit https://shi.com/application-workloads.