How we empower developers with the right tools, platforms and services for a modern Cloud journey
With insurance becoming more and more digital our developers are becoming increasingly more important. With our strengthened focus on utilizing cloud, the main mission within Cloud and DevOps Center of Excellence (CDCE) is to empower developers with the right tools, platforms, and services, while ensuring that If is compliant and secure. We want to help teams find the right path to the cloud, and help establish paved roads to assist access to cloud technologies. In this article we will expand how we work with cloud at If and some examples services we utilize to help achieve our cloud first strategy.
Since the start in 2014 we now have approx. 30% of our workloads in the cloud and are growing fast, 22% growth YoY in Azure consumption in 2021 and looking to grow even more in 2022. The way we have been able to achieve this is not by focusing on lifting workloads to the cloud but rather change the ways of working with an agile and DevOps mindset. As teams shift away from more traditional waterfall development methods, the benefits of using cloud technologies becomes even more apparent and teams quickly take the cloud first strategy to heart. This also benefits If as we do not want to run the same type of workloads in the cloud as we are doing on-prem but rather have more cloud native services.
Ifs Cloud & DevOps Center of Excellence
Ifs Cloud journey started 2014, and so followed the CDCE which has developed to a team that consists of senior architects, DevOps coaches and monitoring evangelists. We do not only help developing central services, but we also try to stay ahead in the cloud journey. There is a trust between each other and a freedom to try out modern approaches, new technology and work methods as well as a push to develop and educate both within the CDCE and towards development teams and If in general.
Through our different expertise areas, we can assist teams throughout the entire application lifecycle with guidelines and paved roads. The CDCE can help teams architecting applications as cost-efficient and secure as possible, find the right work methods that suits your team, how to monitor your application, while using a centralized DevOps toolset.
“The CDCE role is to enable the digitalization journey through coaching of technology and work methods”
As the CDCE team helps many different development teams there is a natural intake of issues and problems with the different services and easy to prioritize opportunities and make informed decisions to support Ifs Cloud and DevOps journey. One of the important decisions have been to go Cloud Native.
Cloud Native
Defined in our modern cloud strategy, we focus on a cloud native approach, using technologies such as serverless, functions, containers with microservice architecture, deployed via declarative code to take full advantage of the features of the public cloud. Choosing specific cloud native services can increase vendor lock-in, and it is something to be aware of when designing your solution, but for If the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.
So, why cloud native?
One of the key benefits of using cloud native services is the decrease of classical operations tasks for teams developing services and the ability to deploy using infrastructure as code. This increases flexibility and freedom for the teams and removes silos (maintenance and operations) as you own the entire life cycle of your application, and not just parts of it.
…and why isn’t vendor lock-in so bad?
It is something to be aware of, as stated. But, in cloud development, either if you go with servers, containers or any PaaS/SaaS, there will be vendor lock-in. Perhaps not as much with servers and containers but there still is. You might say that a server is a server anywhere, and that is totally correct, but that server will require integrations/features that is not part of the server (backup, network, software management, monitoring, agents, and a lot more). So, if we want to be fully cloud agnostic, it will require a whole lot more.
Central services benefits development teams
The entire application stack and its lifecycle consists of many parts regarding both software and infrastructure depending on the requirements and needs of the application. The application might need to be secured from a networking perspective to reach other systems behind firewalls, perhaps a need to produce an API towards external partners with required contracts(OLA,SLA…), there might be a need to register a domain name, and more.
This will require the development teams not only have the needed tools and knowledge, but also to be aligned with internal security policies and cost restrictions.
Therefore, centralizing tools and services when a solution might be highly complex and costly, would greatly reduce time required to create, maintain and run your applications as well as reducing costs.
As an example, running a Network Virtual Appliance (NVA) for each application would:
- Increase cost for your solution, a NVA does not come cheap.
- Require your team to have highly skilled network specialist or re-educate the team
- Require the team to have increased rights in order to make the correct changes to make the application work.
- Decrease the amount of time focused on delivering value.
To not end up offering services just on par with traditional services, If has put a lot of effort in to making sure development teams can easily consume or integrate their solution with central services. Either through policies, APIs or other ways to automatically connect the solution. So the development team still has full control of the application and its integrations.
Apart from a centralized NVA, which is a part of the centralized service of network hub, If also promote using these services to make it easier for teams developing solutions.
- Certificates, specifically for production and public solutions which require a well know certificate, which is procured from a vendor.
- API management is complex from many angles, not only from a technical perspective but a governance as well, therefore a central team and solution is beneficial for If.
- Container hotel, containers are simple, Kubernetes is not. In order to maintain and secure your containers it requires a lot of new knowledge as well as time. Here you can read more about our Container Hotel
- Governance is a combination of security and compliance, Cost transparency and optimization, dashboards, monitoring, and recommendations. Everything is not centralized, but standardized and monitored to help the teams create cost-efficient and secure solutions
- Server Hotel, servers are easy to deploy in cloud, but it requires more to keep it secure and maintained. To help teams focus on their own solution rather than maintenance If have a central server hotel.
What's in it for a developer?
From the perspective of a developer, the CDCE team can help you out from idea to production using the right tools and methods. The use of central services will increase the amount of time to focus on your application and deliver value to your team while having a central support of a Centre of Excellence. As well as increase the speed of moving to cloud from on-prem as you don’t have to develop everything connected to an application.
Modern cloud native solutions are not only something If talks about, its something we do. So, if you are interested working with new technology, and modern work methods. Join our journey.
