The Four Cs of Extending DevOps with Cloud Automation
Combining DevOps with a hybrid cloud architecture breaks down the traditional barriers between development, QA, and IT operations organizations and removes the silos that constrain enterprise development. Companies can change their software development paradigms and rapidly increase software delivery timeframes by adapting enterprise IT architectures to include cloud computing resources that enable agile development, empower software development teams with self service, and support DevOps.
Cloud automation enables greater linkage between development and operations functions. With it, teams can avoid clumsy handoffs between the software release and deployment stages, as well as historical cultural clashes that have occurred when operations personnel felt that developers “threw code over the wall” that operations then had to figure out how to operate reliably.
Cloud automation enables continuous development and delivery of enterprise applications across the entire lifecycle, making the entire continuous delivery process seamless and frictionless for developers, testers, and operations personnel. Organizations benefit from the scale and flexibility of hybrid cloud environments. They can also accelerate software development and increase software innovation by improving:
Consistency
DevOps requires the ability to automate and provision in consistent environments and avoid manual configuration errors. In traditional enterprise data center environments, this has been an ongoing challenge because of the inconsistent environments used by development, testing, and operations organizations, and because of the high risk of manual configuration errors, particularly in complex applications.
Configurability
The enterprise needs to be able to rapidly scale development and operations resources up or down quickly, and change computing environments easily and predictably. But the enterprise data center is naturally constrained by capital budgets and resource allocation requirements. By combining DevOps with a hybrid cloud architecture, the enterprise benefits from configurable virtual data center resources and the ability to configure an elastic hybrid cloud.
Collaboration
To dramatically accelerate software development, we have to eliminate silos and share resources. Developers need to share copies of their lab environments with QA and system administrators. Cross-departmental teams should be able to organize their work in projects, invite specific project members to participate, and assign specific roles or access points to each participant based on roles (e.g., user, manager, database engineer) or status (e.g., employee, contractor). Hybrid cloud computing enables this secure, role-based collaboration that can drive accelerated software development and delivery.
Control Over IT Resources
DevOps requires role-based permissions, auditable actions, and optimal use of resources. By combining DevOps with hybrid cloud architectures, the enterprise can ensure security and access policy management with detailed audit and reporting, and benefit from pay-as-you-go flexibility for clear visibility into resource use that enables full control over IT resources.
DevOps becomes even more powerful when combined with a hybrid cloud architecture that provides tools for sharing information and coordinating projects, helping to dramatically extend the promise of cloud automation.
