- Many enterprises fool themselves
into thinking that a new tool
or technology will provide cloud ops capabilities
but that's only a small fraction of what needs to get done.
So how can you achieve continuous operations
in zero downtime with cloud ops?
First, you need to do some of the basic
requirements planning.
This includes assess the needs of applications
and data sets that you're looking to host in the cloud.
What changes need to be made to support cloud ops?
Create an updated deployment plan
that eliminates planned outages
were updates to systems and applications
do not stop operations.
Create a strategy and technology solution
to work around common problems
that would normally cause downtime.
Use the auto and self-provisioning mechanisms
of your cloud platforms to build and leverage
redundant services that can function independently.
Select cloud ops tools best suited to your needs
as covered above.
CMP or cloud management platform tools
and monitoring and metrics tools are needed at a minimum.
And finally create a process to receive continuous feedback
as to the true effectiveness of cloud ops
and make sure that there is an ongoing
and continuous improvement.
In most companies
systems were built around
different technology stacks approaches
cloud platforms and brands.
This resulted in more complexity
than the operations team could handle.
This means that ops teams must consider
how many types of systems and applications can be operated
in any given time successfully.
While you would have thought that dev ops
which means tightly coupled development
and operations teams would have solved this problem.
The reality is that dev teams
may still not know where the ops teams sit in the building.
In some respects, dev ops pays lip service to IT.
And small dev ops teams
make up only a small portion of how applications
and data stores are built, deployed and operated.
The core of the solution is to work smarter
and simplify the views of other systems.
You could require that ops teams
leverage the native ops console
such as those provided by Amazon web services,
Microsoft and Google.
However, if you add all your cloud native databases
to the list along with performance monitoring, IOT,
serverless computing and the machine learning systems
that need to be managed
you quickly have two dozen or more systems
that need to be managed using native tooling.
All of these are different and require specific skills.
Dealing with complexity is advanced operations.
However, it needs to be a part of your cloud solution.