The use of cloud-native DevOps is not just about speeding up development and deployment cycles; it's also about keeping pace with industry demands for faster, safer, and more efficient ways of doing business.
Cloud-native DevOps is a set of practices and technologies that help you deliver business value faster. It uses microservices, containers, and application development frameworks to create an agile environment for your applications. You can deploy these applications to any cloud provider or use your infrastructure as long as it’s supported by Kubernetes or OpenStack (depending on how you want to run your containers).
Prerequisites and Ancillary Requirements
Cloud-native DevOps is an architecture developed to help simplify the development process. This approach aims to create an environment where applications can be built, tested, and deployed across multiple clouds with minimal overhead. Gartner predicts that cloud deployment of new digital workloads to be around 95% in 2025.
The first step in implementing cloud-native DevOps is understanding your current infrastructure and what changes you need to make in order for it to support this new development approach. In addition, there are other tools needed, such as:
- Container management systems, which will help you manage containers running on various public or private clouds.
- CI/CD tools such as Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) or Kubernetes that allow users access control over their Docker images.
There are also some general requirements before you can move forward with implementing cloud-native DevOps, as discussed below.
Non-commitment to Cloud Services
The key to success with cloud-native DevOps is being dedicated to a holistic approach. This means you must be committed to the cloud without being explicitly tied down by any one service or technology. It’s important to haveal clear understanding of your needs and how these services can meet them. By having a well-defined vision, you are setting your efforts up for success and ensuring its effectiveness.
Additionally, keep your tool stack as flexible as possible so that new tools can be added as needed without requiring much effort. Inculcating a service-oriented mindset will significantly serve the cloud-native development streams. New technologies can only do so much as to give you an incremental advantage over your existing tools, but leapfrogging the industry can only be done with a foundational collaborative culture.
Test Performance in the Cloud
Testing performance in the cloud is a basic requirement for the highly responsive digital resources of today. The increasing load needs to be securely tested in real-time with steep cost-optimization strategies for an effective DevOps process. Cloud performance testing is ideal due to the ability to simulate users from across the world to provide a wide base of web traffic.
- The cloud is a great place to test performance, but it’s not the same as your data center. Test performance in the cloud is essential because it will be cost-efficient due to the reduced need for hardware to allow scaling up or down based on demand.
- Use of a CI system is probably desirable because you need to make sure the environment is secure and reliable. Automated testing during development will lay the groundwork for CI systems like Jenkins and TeamCity.
- Security should be embedded in the workflows to keep up with deployment cycles and provide a stable environment. SASE (secure access service edge) network architecture is increasingly being used to combine the benefits of SD-WAN with secure web gateways such as zero-trust network access. The SASE global market is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 27.34% by Mordor Intelligence through 2027.
Automation is the Future
As repetitive as it may sound, cloud-native DevOps is all about automation using tools like Kubernetes to manage containerized applications. This allows for a faster and more efficient process and enhanced security. You can also take advantage of the many benefits that come with IaC (Infrastructure as Code), such as automated provisioning, which saves you time in setting up servers or creating applications. A recent survey found that over 60% of the surveyed organizations have witnessed more efficient IT operations through cloud infrastructure automation.
Automating environment creation for version updates and/or provisioning for specific services helps save loads of time and keeps errors at bay through simple replication. Replicating environments is easy and highly recommended due to abundant dependencies, keeping track of which is quite cumbersome. Delegating the provisioning task to the system makes much more sense, as the cloud requirements are dynamic.
Workforce Upliftment is Crucial
Investment in ongoing training will not only increase employee satisfaction but also bring long-term benefits to the adoption of a DevOps culture. As discussed earlier, embedding a cultural change has got to be the first step towards genuinely adopting DevOps. This will align the workforce with the organizational goals and help you restructure teams around their competencies. Building capabilities in their areas of interest can further improve performance and provide your organization with cross-department recruitment and promotion opportunities rather than looking for fresh recruits.
Proactive bug bounties result in phenomenal returns by keeping cyberattacks at bay and maintaining the competitive spirit. Educating employees across the board escalates team productivity and induces employee retention due to providing a healthy work culture.
Build your Apps in the Futuristic Way
Cloud-native DevOps is a platform combining serverless architecture principles and automation to give rise to microservices, API-based communication, and containerized pipelines. Financial applications are reaping maximum dividends from the robustness of current innovations as they have enhanced reliability and scalability.
In fact, financial institutions are using cloud-native technologies at different levels across their IT infrastructure. Cloud orchestration helps with compliance and is the solution to an uncertain business environment. Most major banks use virtualization technology (VM) because it requires less hardware investment than traditional physical machines, which makes it easier for them to manage costs over time. This is because they won’t need extra space upfront when building a private cloud solution with VMware vSphere along with OpenStack, Swift, etc.
One thing is clear: the software development approach has significantly shifted towards agile from the traditional waterfall methodology. With companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS) offering PaaS for low/no-code development streams (LCAP), the idea is to keep the entire process secure while retaining all the functionality.
If you’re struggling to choose the best toolset for your organization, contact us to let us assess your requirements and guide you through the process.
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