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At Platform9 we engage daily with customers across industry verticals such as financial services, manufacturing, retail and technology. While no two customer environments are the same from a technology & culture standpoint, the common theme to their concerns is the need to support digital acceleration in their business. Greenfield digital applications add a variety of challenges to the legacy datacenter – the need support a wider variety of rich frontends & channels, the need to accommodate larger volumes of users, and finally need wider support for a range of business actors – partners, suppliers et al via APIs. At the same time legacy applications continue to impose a high cost both in terms of maintenance but also in their inflexibility. Finally, these new age applications need to work with a variety of partner applications. From an operations standpoint, there is a strong need to enable scale via a higher degree of automation in the datacenter without increasing systems administration costs. All of these requirements call for flexibility, agility & low cost as the most important constructs in the new enterprise architecture. The question then becomes, how can a large and complex organization adopt Digital while keeping the lights on in their current technology operations ?
At Platform9, we are happy to share the following five insights we have gleaned from working on these initiatives globally –
Insight #1: Enable Your Developers
No matter what industry vertical you operate in, developing intuitive applications is becoming the cornerstone digital capability. Accordingly, all enterprises need to perform portfolio rationalization at the highest levels to understand which of their applications can benefit from DevOps style development methodologies. Key criteria include the priority of the business in terms of market share gains, new customer sign ups and revenue opportunities. IT criteria include the need for more frequent code deploys, reducing application error rates and minimizing downtime.
Legacy applications (typically defined as created more than 5+ years ago) are beginning to emerge as one of the key obstacles in going Digital. The issue is not just in the underlying architectures themselves but also in the development culture involved building and maintaining such applications. One of the biggest reasons for Digital transformations and organizational change initiatives to fail is the real or perceived lack of innovative business functionality – which is greatly dependent on how we enable our engineers to go fast. Developers often de-facto lead the digital transformation and the development and adoption of new capabilities around software development and delivery, when they are more productive and choose tools and processes that allow them to more easily build and ship products.
Insight #2: Adopt Lean & Purposeful Dev and Operations Automation
Forrester Research has termed 2018, the Year of DevOps [1] and in the report, they have clearly spelled out that operations teams need to automate processes for change management, self service and incident automation.
The following complex challenges which often lead to delays can typically be solved via automation –
- Long procurement cycles for IT resources,
- A high rate of errors in provisioning
- Lockin via proprietary cloud APIs
- Poor cloud governance
- Lack of consistency across private and public clouds
To that end, it is important to embrace lean principles rather than adopting complex cloud management products that do not provide “self service” but rather force them to open tickets — and wait. A lean approach to cloud management also ensures that the true benefits of a demand-driven, self-service based model can be realized. It also means that critical functions like capacity management, chargeback, and operational efficiency can be institutionalized thus realizing cost savings and positively influencing business outcomes. A lean approach not only provides a single pane of glass rather quickly but helps in operationalizing the cloud in very short amount of time while enabling the avoidance of expensive professional services. A key tenet is to shy away from undue complexity in cloud management. Simplify cloud management. Move away from a model of paying millions in consulting and product to stand up a cloud. Drive immediate business value. How fast can one get started at scale and expand? That’s a key metric.
Insight #3: Avoid Cloud & Datacenter lockin by adopting open standards
Multi-cloud management is a challenge that IT will need to deal with and that executives would need to plan for in the entire business case – from the perspectives of economics, value realization, headcount planning, chargeback etc. The ‘single pane of management’ is a worthy goal to aspire to. However, beware of vendors selling ‘integrated’ stacks. These are as much a lock-in as are the public cloud APIs. For instance take OpenStack. Every service within OpenStack can be accessed and invoked via an API – which then creates the ability to provide self-service as a building block. With projects such as OpenStack Omni, OpenStack can serve as the single pane of glass that federates access to any underlying virtualization (VMWare, KVM) and cloud provider (OpenStack, AWS, Azure, GCP et al). Self-service portals can easily be created that allow users to individually provision and manage their own resources, which are isolated from the resources of other users. It is worth noting that much of the innovation and experimentation in software delivery is happening typically in the open source communities- and digital disruptors should encourage their engineers and IT to listen to open source developments, learn from them and take advantage of open source in their organization.
Insight #4: Have a Plan for moving the Legacy to Digital
While greenfield applications can be built using new technologies or architectures, for a range of use cases across verticals, it is important to keep in mind that the shiny new tech needs to be balanced with support for the legacy. For instance, Container-based software development and deployment methodologies are all the rage, while legacy applications that function well using VMs still support large application estates. These applications can be migrated over time to new architecture, but many organizations would need to support “legacy” systems for a long time to come, alongside more modern applications. Whatever your migration or coexistence strategy, investing in a unified experience and single pane of glass to manage all your types of infrastructure – VM workloads, containers and serverless, across private, public cloud and containers – are key. These will serve as a way of de-risking and increasing the efficiency of your IT and data center investments and will greatly simplify your operations- in an IT reality that otherwise keeps on getting more and more complex.
Insight #5: Learn from the Pioneers & Do not Neglect Enterprise “Must Haves”
Leveraging successful blueprints and patterns around vertical industry use cases and digital transformation would accelerate your success. How industry leaders leverage the cloud for specific use cases is information that is typically available to other players operating in the vertical. In addition, remember that the enterprise ‘must haves’ must all be supported across both the legacy and the new technology investments – such as security, scalability, ACLs, auditing, monitoring, logging Provisioning processes and quotas, upgrades, rollbacks, billing, disaster recovery, DevOps CI/CD pipelines, and more. We recommend open standards such as OpenStack, Kubernetes form the backbone of your Digital acceleration effort. It is very important to avoid lock-in both from a Cloud provider and from a development/operations standpoint.
References..
[1] https://go.forrester.com/blogs/2018-the-year-of-enterprise-devops/