Customers frequently ask about challenges managing their evolving distributed, hybrid cloud environments. Questions vary but often come back having to look at things in a different way than you might have in a more traditional on-prem environment, even just a few years back.
Not a hosting platform, but a platform for business services
One essential thing to keep top-of-mind is that it’s not simply a platform to host applications, but rather, a platform to build, operate and deliver business services. These are two fundamentally different concepts.
According to KrishnaPrasath Hari, Hitachi Vantara’s VP, Digital Modernization, “when you look at it in that context, the traditional on-prem operating model, which looks at infrastructure, applications, data, and security in silos, doesn’t work.” The answer, he explains, is to see all these resources as a single integrated workload, designed from the very start to maximize agility, cost efficiency, and quality.
Managing complexity with the “two-pizza” team approach
The design and scale of these kinds of integrations in continually evolving environments requires a robust, flexible hybrid cloud operations strategy. This was a central topic in our recent webinar, Strategies to Manage Cloud Operations in Your Hybrid & Distributed Environments, featuring Hari, colleague Samta Bansal, and Bobby Hallahan, Sr. Specialist, Solutions Architect, at partner Amazon Web Services.
Bringing together and managing these previously siloed disciplines as a holistic workload also presents people challenges. “Different teams need to be familiar with different kinds of platforms, and you have to be able to upscale everyone at the same time,” Hallahan says. Adding, this can be hard with too many people involved.
CloudOps provides an ideal approach, though the onus is on the people using it to take personal responsibility to ensure the workload is stable, reliable, secure, and cost effective. Hallahan notes AWS addresses this with their “two-pizza” rule, which says to be successful, teams should be small enough to be fed by two pizzas. The motto, “you build it, you run it, you own it,” gives the team a great deal of responsibility for ensuring the workload’s success.
Designing for resilience, cost, and business outcomes
A CloudOps approach also empowers the team with critical visibility, and to maintain a zero-trust security policy, with tight controls over privileges and authentication. Hitachi Vantara’s Bansal says this kind of bottoms-up, hands-on strategy, combined with top-down objectives of delivering against business outcomes, is critical to cloud and application modernization. “You have to keep iterating, constantly go back to why you built this workload, is it matching the expected outcome, what KPIs do I need to improve on, and keep continuous eye on doing so,” Bansal says.
Check out the webinar, Strategies to Manage Cloud Operations in Your Hybrid & Distributed Environments, to learn more, including insight on preparing for changes yet to come. Or find out more about how we can provide expert guidance as part of our Hitachi Application Reliability Centers (HARC) services.
#ApplicationModernization#CloudAdvisory#CloudCostManagement#CloudMigration#CloudOperations#CloudSecurity------------------------------
Krishnaprasath Hari
Vice President - Digital Modernization, Cloud Modernization Group
Hitachi Vantara
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