How on-premises cloud platforms support Continuous Development and Delivery

If cloud platforms accelerate the application life-cycle by applying new technology to operations and integrating and aligning applications and infrastructure, the challenge for IT is to regain control over the process. The answer is to deploy a private cloud platform. With a self-provisioning private cloud platform, DevOps teams can continue to set up their own workspaces and access the tools they need to complete their development cycle, and IT’s private cloud – rather than a public cloud provider – makes those resources available.

As compared to public cloud, private cloud delivers improved security and governance, higher performance, and lower costs. It also unifies the separate compute, storage, and networking silos to deliver a cost-optimized IT infrastructure.

What’s required in a cloud platform to support digital transformation

Here are some specific attributes a private cloud should have in order to meet the demands of an organization moving toward digital transformation.

• Simple Deployment. An enterprise shouldn’t have to invest in specialized cloud experts and spend months deploying a private cloud. Some private cloud platforms can now be deployed within an hour by existing IT personnel.
• Automated provisioning tools. A self-service private cloud should offer a set of automated provisioning tools to allow developers and testers to create their own DevOps and DevTest environments. It should include both a self-service user interface and an API-driven Infrastructure as code that lets developers create VMs and databases, access storage, set up network connections, etc., using RESTful API coding.
• DevOps Workbench.  A private cloud platform must add value to application developers as well as to IT operations. The cloud should include a DevOps Workbench that allows individual developers to quickly and easily create the environment they need to develop, test, and deploy their application. Developers should be able to use a self-service, AWS-like interface to request and immediately receive needed infrastructure from the pool of resources made available by IT.  The cloud should include a catalog of popular open source DevOps tools that can be quickly and automatically deployed.
• Application Store. The cloud should incorporate an application store where developers can have point-and-click access to common tools and services, such as Jenkins, Git, and Maven; Ansible, Chef and Puppet; RabbitMQ and Redis; and storage backends such as MySQL, Postgres, Cassandra, and MongoDB.
• Hyper-Converged Operations.  The private cloud platform should converge operational silos and enable IT administrators to manage resources through a single interface. The operations interface should be a SaaS application that provides any-time, anywhere cloud-based management of the application infrastructures. A SaaS platform is the best venue for a self-service private cloud solution because it makes it easy to do upgrades to the various features of the UI, application store, and administrative dashboards.
• Application Optimization.  The cloud should employ machine learning algorithms to ensure that each application workload has the resources it needs.
• Automated resource optimization. The cloud should use machine learning to guide placement of application workloads, and to recommend changes to application resources over time based on observed behavior.  These capabilities increase the productivity of developers and shorten time to deliver application changes.

Conclusion

The world is changing through digital transformation, and all companies are becoming software companies. But in order to compete successfully in this new environment, companies need to empower their DevOps organizations with self-service private cloud platforms that deliver agile development capabilities while reducing complexity, costs and operational overhead for IT organizations. With the right private cloud platform, any company can make the digital transformation to agile software development.