What is CloudOps?
Organizations are migrating their infrastructure to the cloud with the intent of enhancing scalability while optimizing performance and capacity. Irrespective of which platform is used or infrastructure location, CloudOps provides organizations with proper resource management. In an organization, CloudOps uses DevOps principles and IT operations applied to a cloud-based architecture to speed up the business processes. CloudOps relies on continuous operations, and this approach is adopted from DevOps.
What is DevOps?
In DevOps development and operations teams are taken together to accelerate the business processes linked with the software teams and the services they provide on any cloud platform. The main objective of DevOps teams is to provide organizations with improved communication between development and IT teams. The core of DevOps stresses to reduce the amount of time required to deploy any software or updates.
Difference between DevOps and CloudOps
When it comes to DevOps, automation is the key. It delivers agile and repeatable processes to get the best final product. Contrary, CloudOps is a way of doing DevOps, but without using any on-site network server assets. It takes advantage of powerful cloud computing tools like Amazon Web Services(AWS), Google Cloud Platform(GCP), and Azure.
Key Differences Between the Two:
- Affordability: With the enormous number of cloud-based platforms available, CloudOps providers compete for quality and prices. The organizations that use cloud computing do not have to worry about maintaining an expensive network architecture on-site. In fact, they can team up with the cloud service providers to get support for all networking/server needs without compromising on affordability.
However, DevOps is relatively a new concept and its experts are in huge demand because of the rising popularity of DevOps, hiring an expert can be costly. Plus, making changes to your existing software infrastructure is also an expensive option.
- Expansion Ready: With CloudOps, organizations can get better expandable storage and processing power as per their needs. But in the case of DevOps, when your dependence on the on-site infrastructure is massive, expanding or upgrading complete infrastructure to optimize software delivery is not as easy. Besides being an expensive option, it’s a complicated procedure too.
- Primary Focus: DevOps engineers handle both projects, whether it’s a cloud-based application or downloadable software. Contrary, Cloud engineers work to design cloud systems for the organization itself. In this way, DevOps seems a viable option, as it provides more freedom to the organization.
Benefits of Cloud-Based Platforms for DevOps:
- Efficiency: Cloud-based platforms are incredibly efficient to use as they are not tied to a physical location; they can be accessed from anywhere. As developing on the cloud allows users to showcase their applications quickly, it allows faster time-to-market.
- Scalability: Cloud-based platforms are best for businesses with fluctuating bandwidth demands. This scalability can provide organizations with an added advantage over their competitors. It also reduces the risks linked to maintenance and operations.
- Disaster Recovery: IT organizations face the risk of losing all their data and not able to recover it. But when organizations opt for cloud-based platforms, they don't have to worry about it anymore; the cloud assures that the data is always available, even if laptops or PCs are damaged. For all sorts of emergency scenarios, cloud services are always available with a quick data recovery solution.
Challenges While Adopting CloudOps:
Moving to new technology can be challenging, whether it is DevOps or CloudOps. If you’re planning to move to CloudOps then you may encounter any of the following challenges:
- Additional Layers of Scrutiny: CloudOps works using dashboards and tools that automate the monitoring process, but that doesn't eliminate the need for hardware; cloud-based platforms also require a physical server to operate. This might involve an extra layer of troubleshooting and maintenance from both the cloud help desk and the traditional help desk.
- A Comprehensive Strategy Is a Must: To ensure a smooth transition, the right expertise and guidance are required, and because many of these technologies are new, it's challenging to get the needed support from the limited pool of people. Thus, to have a successful and robust CloudOps transformation, a consistent plan is required.
- Compliance Issues: Organizations often face compliance issues while migrating to CloudOps. It is the duty of IT governance to ensure that IT assets are implemented and used according to the terms and policies and that they are being maintained and controlled.
CloudOps Best Practices:
Obviously, integrating CloudOps into your process can be difficult but you can’t deny the fact that it has a lot to offer. So instead of scrapping it out, consider implementing the following best practices:
- Provisioning: CloudOps provides organizations with a different kind of provisioning like managing the provisions of machine insights on the cloud. There are two types of provisioning available. The first is self-provisioning, which allows the cloud users to have their own machines, and organizations can track the usage. The other one is auto-provisioning, as the name suggests, in this, applications themselves request more machines, and they can automatically de-provision the machines when no longer required.
- Setting Limits: CloudOps best practices involve setting limits as to what all can be done within the public cloud environment. With a cloud-based environment, a user can provide their own machine, but it's almost impossible to set up 1,000 machines at a time. This is the reason why setting limits is required to ensure that applications are being managed within budgets only.
- Automation: It's essential to automate almost everything. This can include anything from user management to API governance. When automating the CloudOps processes, organizations can themselves understand that most of the processes follow a naturally repeatable pattern, which further helps in automating the processes.
- Self-Healing: While automating the processes, it would be a great thing to introduce the self-healing capabilities of the cloud provider. This means automated procedures should have the capability to correct minor issues by themselves.
Conclusion
CloudOps is the advanced version of DevOps. As more organizations are shifting towards Cloud platforms, it makes sense to use CloudOps, but there are plenty of limitations that will make you think twice before you move to such platforms.
In this article, we have listed down the potential complexities that you might come across, so if you are planning to incorporate CloudOps as your preference, please make sure they read them. Also, keep the best practices in your mind while setting up your new CloudOps initiative.
