DevOps from Home: What Can We Learn from the Cloud-Savvy?
By Brandon Ebken, CTO, Digital Innovation, Insight
The coronavirus has pushed businesses all over the world to fully embrace the remote workforce, and stories have proliferated about who’s done well, who’s not, and what businesses need to do to be effective. Much of the more technical advice boils down to getting up and running in the cloud to the greatest extent feasible for your business — something my colleagues and I advocate for as a necessary cornerstone of digital innovation.
This advice is all well and good in the abstract, but what does success look like from a practical standpoint? What are the proof points for cloud adoption, especially when companies are juggling constrained budgets, shifting priorities, and rapidly changing the way they conduct day-to-day business?
I’ll start with the caveat that the cloud is not a panacea when it comes to the dispersed workforce. (Challenges like reliable individual internet connectivity, change management, etc., apply regardless of infrastructure.) However, when properly implemented, the cloud allows organizations to be nimbler and more creative — something that I’ve seen firsthand when working with DevOps teams already well-versed in maximizing the cloud.
The Benefits of Using the Cloud in DevOps
Not all DevOps teams have fully embraced the cloud, but among those that have, there are three key areas where they excel: access, speed and governance.
Access: The cloud inherently allows DevOps teams to code anywhere and deploy anywhere. Often, organizations running applications in their own data centers are dependent on physical infrastructure that requires an employee on-premises. This dependence is typically the result of security policies and network architecture. Technologies such as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and Virtual Private Network software can enable remote access but require additional cost and reduced performance.
All cloud providers subscribe to a shared responsibility model when it comes to security, where the provider is responsible for the overall security of the cloud in terms of hardware, software and facilities, and the customer is responsible for the security of the apps, data and services running in the cloud.
Moving to the cloud is certainly not less secure, but it does require organizations to address and reconfigure security architecture and policies for a shared responsibility model.
DevOps teams that transitioned to the cloud before COVID-19 hit are in a stronger position from a business continuity perspective. Not only do they have the infrastructure in place to work from any place, any time, their developers already are used to operating in the cloud environment. This means a more minimal learning curve, at least from a technical perspective.
Speed: The cloud facilitates agility for DevOps teams, enabling a more real-time, iterative model that reduces the overall product development cycle. All cloud providers deliver best-in-class tooling to support best practices to significantly increase a team’s velocity — support code management, continuous integration/continuous delivery, infrastructure as code, monitoring, alerts, etc. Without changing any code, DevOps teams often see a significant increase in productivity just by leveraging modern practices and tooling that are natively provided by the cloud.
Further, provisioning of new resources is much faster in a cloud environment, as servers can be provisioned with a few clicks (and automated).
The cloud also speeds development by enabling modern cloud-native architectures. Cloud providers provide rich platform-as-a-service and serverless models that reduce the complexity of development and the sheer amount of code that needs to be written. This enables organizations to shift gears, quickly correct mistakes and adapt to a fluid business environment. Additionally, these platform services provide increased innovation, such as leveraging pre-trained models and cognitive services to introduce aspects of artificial intelligence.
Governance: Governance is critical in the cloud, however, to ensure resources are set up smartly and optimized accordingly. There are many organizations that have rolled their own cloud on-premises and solved many of the challenges above. This takes a very mature organization and is a time-consuming process (and hybrid cloud is likely the optimal architecture of the future). The cloud just makes things very easy, as the services are either inherent to the cloud, available within a few clicks, or automated “as code.”
Fortunately, the cloud providers all provide a vast set of resources and utilities, including monitoring, auditing, alerting and AI-driven recommendations. This greatly simplifies the governance and management of cloud environments and must be carefully considered as part of an organization’s cloud strategy.
How Is This Applicable to My Business?
Comparing the way development teams use the cloud to the way other businesses do so isn’t apples-to-apples. Moreover, many organizations were not cloud enabled prior to the coronavirus and are still struggling to get there amid competing priorities and a variety of pressing business challenges. That isn’t to say, however, that there are no lessons to be taken from the cloud-savvy.
One key takeaway is the importance of flexibility and a willingness to invest in improved technology infrastructure. This is easy enough to advocate for during the good times; much less so during the bad. However, in the current environment, IT professionals and advocates can and should be making the case to their organizations to not let these investments completely fall by the wayside, even if they may ultimately be smaller than ideal. Modernizing IT infrastructure, incrementally or otherwise, can support the business both now and in the future.
The other lesson we can learn is that innovation is a business imperative. DevOps is on the front lines of innovation every day, and their embrace of new technology to fuel better outcomes is something all organizations should emulate.
What Organizations Can Do Now
To tie this all together and put these lessons into action, here are a few steps organizations can take to make progress on cloud adoption and improving the remote work experience in the present:
· Tap into the public cloud to enable more effective data storage, access and sharing among remote employees.
· Identify what tools you can access to improve collaboration and acclimate employees to working more effectively in virtual environments.
· Don’t lose sight of technology investments during strategic planning discussions. Many businesses are struggling and have had to make painful cuts over the past several months; that said, letting your IT infrastructure buckle can lead to more pain, both now and in the long run.
Many organizations do face limits in terms of how much and when they can invest in their IT capabilities. It’s important to remember that the current state of affairs isn’t permanent; even if innovation must be put on hold, it needn’t be fully discarded. In fact, investing in certain innovation initiatives could help ready the organization to weather a future crisis with less disruption.
Brandon focuses on strategic delivery efforts and new technology initiatives in his role as Chief Technology Officer for Insight Enterprises’ Digital Innovation team. He educates customers on the business value of IT, helping them innovate smarter and drive differentiation across digital experiences via cloud technologies.
