CTO at Cloudify; constantly addressing and solving industry pain points, steering technical direction of the company.
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A lot has already been said about what the cloud can do for your business in a post-Covid-19 world.
According to Flexera, some 47% of companies are mapping out a road for increased usage of the cloud after Covid-19. Why? The report suggests the increase may be due to the extra capacity needed for current cloud-based apps (to meet increased demand in line with a surge in usage). There are also companies that may make a fast move from data centers to the cloud due to a reduction in headcount, increased difficulties in accessing data centers and delays in the more traditional hardware supply chains. The public cloud could very well be a savior for business continuity.
So, the question remains: Why is this migration taking so long?
A report from DXC Technology offers an interesting explanation: 66% of companies state that their mission-critical systems are so complex that they are delaying any major changes. What's more, 62% noted a lack of a common tool sets (and platforms), creating "digital islands" (correct tech units working independently of each other).
Indeed, the force behind the move to cloud-native and the public cloud often comes down to two things:
- The speed at which new platforms and tools are being introduced — with the move to the cloud being far faster than the speed of adoption. This results in an ever-growing number of technology and data silos within the organization.
- Most new cloud-native platforms have been built for greenfield environments and do not cater to existing mission-critical environments.
Below are four key steps that can help speed up your move to cloud-native and the public cloud in a post-Covid-19 world:
1. Put the existing ‘mission-critical’ system and cloud-native environments under one common automation scheme.
Migrating your "mission-critical" system into cloud-native and microservices is going to be a long and complex process. In many cases, the effort won't even make economic sense.
An alternative to this transformation approach is to put these systems and cloud-native services under a common multicloud orchestration and management platform. With this approach, you can avoid long transformations and tighten the process of migrating the rest of your environment into cloud-native and public clouds.
2. Break your automation silos using an ‘orchestrator of orchestrator’ approach.
A common cause of silos is the lack of singular common automation and management. One solution here is to use an "orchestrator of orchestrator" approach, which can house all automation platforms (Kubernetes, Ansible, AWS Cloud Formation, Azure ARM, Terraform, etc.) under a common management layer.
In this way, we can use each automation template as a building block within an end-to-end automation environment. We can also execute end-to-end workflows spanning different cloud infrastructures and across all infrastructure and application layers.
3. Think of everything as code.
Infrastructure as code (IaaC) is a well-known term in the cloud world, bringing agility to IT infrastructure and operations via infrastructure transformation. This method turns reactive, ticket-driven operations into proactive models for teams to develop application program interfaces (APIs) for both businesses and developers.
To achieve the same level of agility across the entire stack, it is important to apply the same principle to the rest of the organization stack (database as a service, security, content). This can be achieved by exposing the remaining business services using API, managing via a common continuous integration/continuous delivery tool.
To note, infrastructure as code is a method that was used to transform infrastructure management from being driven by ops to being driven by the application developers. This method enabled a faster application delivery process.
4. Optimize for cost from the get-go.
According to the Flexera report, 20% of organizations are already spending more than $1 million a month on cloud services. This cost can quickly skyrocket because many organizations do not take cost optimization into consideration as part of the development process. Cost governance tools are often less effective, as they are applied after the fact at a point where adopting changes to optimize costs is fairly hard.
Having end-to-end modeling of the entire infrastructure grants a better estimation of costs during the design and development process and, thus, allows early cost optimization. In addition, end-to-end automation of the entire development (and testing the environment) allows an organization to implement cost-saving policies, such as decommissioning entire environment resources when possible or ensuring that orphan resources will remain "hanging" by putting a time limit on newly created testing and development environments.
Cloud platforms have the power to deploy a variety of tasks in days rather than months and can also support analytics usually deemed "uneconomical" or "impossible" using traditional technology platforms. However, the move to cloud-native and the public cloud is only the beginning of a journey that organizations have to go through to become fully digital and agile.
Covid-19 is putting a lot of pressure on organizations to speed up the transformation to cloud-native and public clouds. Putting all automation silos and multiclouds together can speed up this transformation by combining existing mission-critical and public cloud services under a consistent management and automation framework.
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