Building A DevOps Operating Model To Enable A Multicloud Strategy

It’s a multicloud world; we’re just living in it. Here’s how DevOps can make you successful.

With the right multicloud strategy, you can embrace DevOps practices and cloud-native architectures without sacrificing governance and control.

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DevOps is the modern process for building and managing digital services that helps organizations better serve customers. Alone, the discipline—a blend of software development and IT operations—provides only so much value.

Enterprises have long augmented their DevOps strategies with cloud-native architectures, delivered in containers orchestrated by Kubernetes. These architectures lend themselves well to the automation capabilities required to support frequent software updates through a Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) strategy. Together, DevOps and cloud-native architectures have provided the ability to deliver technology in an agile fashion which leads to better, more resilient experiences—and better outcomes.

Of course, challenges abound. As organizations diversify their IT portfolios by implementing more SaaS and on-premises applications, DevOps continues to become more bespoke and complex.

Through code, teams are tasked with automating and operating more with fewer resources. This means engineering teams must be agile and responsive. On premises, the availability of the correct tooling and infrastructure resources is vital and if impacted, they’ll lose crucial development time. The challenge ratchets up in multicloud environments as multiple deployment options with disparate runtime formats and management interfaces increase complexity and decrease efficiency.

Now for the good news: with the right strategy you can adopt DevOps practices and embrace cloud-native architectures while leveraging a multicloud experience that incorporates the right governance and control to achieve business outcomes.

A brief DevOps refresher

Let's dive a little deeper into what that means for a company’s ability to produce software and run more efficient operations.

Traditional software development relies on manual handoffs between developers who write code and operations teams that manage infrastructure, which can bog down the process. By adopting DevOps practices, software development and IT operations work together, shortening the software development cycle. Processes such as CI/CD eliminate the traditional hand-offs between developers and infrastructure heads, which means DevOps teams automate testing, integration and deployment that facilitate fast feedback and more rapid development cycles.

This crisper pace of software development can yield a competitive advantage for businesses, many of which are trying to get new applications out the door faster.

For instance, during the early days of the pandemic, many large retailers quickly added curbside pickup and other features to their mobile applications and websites to accommodate customers’ wishes for social distancing. Modern applications deployed in cloud environments, thanks in part to DevOps practices, helped these companies introduce this functionality in just days or weeks compared to months or even years of traditional development.

If your organization already has a DevOps practice you likely already know the benefits of DevOps when paired with a cloud-like operating model. Developers enjoy faster runtimes and better performance, thanks to significant automation. This means organizations can reduce toil, allowing application teams to focus on refining their feature functionality and writing more precise code while reacting nimbly to changing business requirements. When combined with the ability to dynamically scale capacity up or down, organizations gain huge efficiencies in IT operations.

Another way to deliver a cloud experience

There is a perception that a shift to public cloud is required to get access to these modern capabilities. Many organizations have also told us they still have investments in on-premises infrastructure, and these existing investments need to be extended and adapted to support modern applications approaches. Fortunately, there is a way to evolve them by adding these new capabilities in a private or hybrid cloud on-premises from your data centers to your edge, in colocation facilities adjacent to your public cloud vendors or natively in a public cloud.

This intentional approach to deploying workloads on hybrid cloud infrastructure is multicloud by design. And the goal is to help enterprises consume resources as-a-Service.

Your developers can stand up self-service automation for infrastructure provisioning with governance, eliminating the dependency on IT operations for provisioning resources, saving time and costs while providing more rapid time to value. This will help your organization achieve business outcomes without the toil of ticket-based operations and manual racking and stacking. Moreover, businesses can consolidate and simplify IT operations and monitoring on-premises, while reducing business risk with embedded security and compliance. Using a self-service console, DevOps teams can also analyze capacity consumption, measure performance and get a real-time system health.

How can you do this today?

Solving your DevOps challenge

Dell’s broad portfolio of solutions and services helps you address these challenges. This includes products that leverage Kubernetes to deploy modern applications in a consistent manner across private, public and edge locations. Our Container Storage Interfaces and innovative Container Storage Modules integrate data storage and protection. You can also automate DevOps practices through standardized RESTful APIs and pre-built integrations with a broad set of tools. We’ve partnered with popular Kubernetes platform providers, such as AWS, Azure, VMware, Google Cloud, OpenShift and SUSE, as well as tooling providers like Ansible and Terraform to give you the most flexibility and choice. Here’s where you can learn more about Dell’s portfolio of DevOps solutions.