Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2015. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Jason English, virtualization author and Galactic Head, Product Marketing, Skytap
2015: The DevOps on ICE Tour
Similar to the rapid transformation toward virtualization in
the data center we saw in 2005, for 2015 we are seeing the leading indicators
of high adoption rates of public cloud among larger enterprises, starting with innovation
spaces such as software and product design. Large enterprises best suited to
survive the next wave of market change will employ Cloud development and
testing labs as an "agility equalizer" against smaller, nimbler
competitors who are skating rings around them.
Large, well-established companies have been late to the game
in moving away from on-premise datacenters and adopting public cloud resources
due to several well-known objections, from perceived security and cost control
concerns, to unknown performance in production. But these excuses are falling
away as highly scalable businesses are being developed and delivered into
highly elastic and scalable cloud infrastructure. Now, you can achieve highly
secure and available cloud infrastructure from several reputable providers on a
pay-as-you-go basis for a fraction of the capital outlay of building and
managing your own datacenters.
The primary reason large enterprises were recalcitrant about
cloud until now is one of momentum: immeasurable sunk costs in production
systems needed to run the business, and the on-premise conventional and virtual
labs that service them in pre-production, which tend to fluctuate between being
over-capacity at peak times, and sitting idle the majority of the time. It is
here, in the realm of product and service innovation, where public cloud
provides a natural advantage for change over these manually configured lab
systems. This year, many larger enterprises are "dipping their toes in the
water" by using public clouds for new software design projects, and
realizing the efficiency of providing on-demand resources for their most highly
valued dev/test teams. They are also finding that public cloud labs provide
great sandboxes for new integrations and collaboration with business partners.
Software development organizations can now run with
industrialized lab environments that very closely mirror production style
systems. These labs can be defined using infrastructure-as-code approaches
(such as Puppet/Chef, Vagrant, etc.), or automatically deployed in sync with
development using leading Continuous Integration tools (like Jenkins, TFS,
Urbancode, etc.), and then quickly cloned and managed in public clouds as
Environments-as-a-Service. Development and test teams can work with these very
accurately modeled labs in parallel, and deliver new innovation to market
faster without constraints or impact to production resources. Therefore
software releases happen faster, with a higher degree of confidence that
defects and performance issues have been identified and resolved first in
cloud-based labs.
While larger companies will still operate their
production applications using on-premise hardware, these new approaches to
continuous integration are helping to close this gap between Dev and Ops in the
cloud, and encouraging far greater adoption. Call it DevOps if you like. I'm calling 2015 the year of DevOps on ICE:
Infrastructure-as-Code-as-Environments, all working together on a frictionless
Cloud surface for faster innovation at enterprise scale.
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About the Author
Jason English, virtualization author and
Galactic Head, Product Marketing, Skytap
