How familiar is your team with CloudOps? Here are some basics to boost their knowledge.
As organizations continue to move more workloads to cloud, and cloud adoption increases, they are now in need of a structured IT function that ensures management, delivery and consumption of applications and services in an environment where there is limited visibility into underlying infrastructure and services provided by hyperscalers such as AWS, Azure and GCP. Cloud Operations, referred as CloudOps, has become an industry standard and is prominent across organizations to address the need for effective and efficient cloud workload management.
CloudOps is a combination of best practices and engineering principles for managing delivery, tuning, optimization and availability of workloads and IT services that run in a cloud environment covering multi and hybrid cloud, as well as in the data center and at the edge.
The key pillars of CloudOps that are important to be aware of include:
1. Comprehensive observability – This is responsible for:
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- Creating comprehensive runtime visibility into cloud environments and applications/services running on top, as well as enabling business and operations teams make informed decisions.
- Enabling operations teams to identify problems proactively and resolve them before they cause any damage to end users and the business.
- Helping teams identify opportunities for improvements.
2. Hyper automation – Automation capabilities are necessary across CloudOps functions to meet the on-demand delivery of cloud resources, address gaps management processes and eliminate expensive manual labor. Some of the automations that can be focused on include:
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- Standardization of operational functions like provisioning and configuring resources to scale fast and efficiently.
- Leveraging observability and implementing automated incident management, as well as self-healing capabilities to improve availability.
- Leveraging DevOps toolchains with autonomous and self-service tools for repeatable processes.
3. Resiliency and reliability – The highly distributed nature of cloud workloads and deployments brings enormous challenges to teams running cloud workloads, in terms of managing availability of services to end users. Hence, it is imperative that resilience and reliability be an utmost focus from the beginning of cloud migration and modernization. Some of the key aspects that need to be built early on include:
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- Designing applications and cloud infrastructure with fault tolerance capabilities to withstand failures in production.
- Putting in guidelines and policies around coding best practices for optimized code development and security controls.
- Leveraging chaos engineering practices to study and strengthen resiliency capabilities.
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- Leveraging SRE practices for efficient operations of cloud workloads.
4. Cloud cost optimization – Cloud cost optimization typically focuses on the key areas of utilization and waste of resources to optimize the cost, instead of as an after-the-fact, one-time activity. Instead, cloud cost management needs to be integrated directly into cloud operations processes, and should be looked at during every stage of cloud workload management, e.g.:
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- Designing and architecting applications for optimized cloud consumption.
- Writing cost conscious code so that applications don't consume resources more than they should.
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- Implementing comprehensive tagging practices as part of provisioning and deployment, to keep track of cloud spend in alignment with business needs.
- Continuous review of cloud consumption to eliminate potential waste from unused resources.
CloudOps is an integral element of our Hitachi Application Reliability Centers service offering, enabling our team to provide a range of cloud operations and management services to our customers so they are able to focus their own internal team’s attention on innovation and revenue generating activities and initiatives.
How does my description align with your own experience and knowledge of CloudOps? Anything that I haven’t touched on that you think is critical to your future needs? Reply below and let me know, looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
#CloudOperations #CloudCostManagement #ApplicationModernization #CloudAdvisory #CloudMigration------------------------------
Marimuthu Muthusamy
Senior Director of Delivery and Consulting
Hitachi Vantara
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