DevOps goes hand-in-hand with cloud computing. This is a very important, and pretty universal understanding among developers, engineers, and operations managers. Especially if your business is in the space of SaaS or app development via the cloud.
Why is the cloud and DevOps relationship so important? Agility! The automation of DevOps is supportive to the agility cloud serves up. You can get some real-time insight on this relationship from examining the Helm repository from JFrog.
When your team wants to tether DevOps with cloud computing, you will still need a high level of focus in the following principles:
- A continuous process is critical. A continuous process is much needed, and this includes processes like testing, development, staging, operations, deployment, and more. All aspects of these processes should be automated.
- Fast changes are a must. It is important to have efficiency and speed within your development and operations. If changes need to be made, it shouldn’t take more than a day to do so. And deployment should have unlimited provisioning of resources.
- All should exist in the cloud. Well, processes can also exist on premises or in some kind of hybrid way. Also be sure to support major cloud companies like Google AWS, and Microsoft.
Ready to bring your DevOps and cloud strategy to fruition. Let’s take an in-depth look at the DevOps steps for maximum cloud success.
Step 1: Make Knowing Your Requirements A Priority
This is a very important first step. You may think this is pretty obvious, yet so many companies miss the mark here when it comes to DevOps and cloud. The first part of step one is to understand the patterns of solutions within your applications.
Is there a ton of data? Is it processor-heavy? Do I need to plan for special hardware or software requirements? The list of questions goes on and on, but you get the idea. And don’t forget to keep security, monitoring, performance, and other requirements at the forefront.
Step 2: What’s The Development Process?
This question will give you direction for step two when maximizing cloud success for your company. Development processes can differ between businesses, but it is important to know the core processes and keep up-to-date on what is changing.
You want to have your thumb on the pulse when it comes to DevOps processes like continuous development, continuous testing, continuous integration, continuous deployment, and more.
Step 3: Ensure You Have Automated Testing In Place
Automated testing is a major must-do when it comes to maximizing cloud success for your company. DevOps strategies that leverage private cloud and public cloud platforms need to have continuous automated testing in place.
These kinds of services can be provided by target public cloud platforms or even a third-party cloud provider. You may even have them on-premises. Be sure to have automation at the tip of your testing spear to keep things easier down the road.
Step 4: Get The Right DevOps Team
DevOps is more than just development processes and automation. If you want to maximize cloud success within your company’s DevOps and cloud strategy, you need to hire the right people. You also need the right people in the right places, and well trained.
A strong plan that identifies gaps in skills, as well as skills you will need to obtain. This plan should also lead to minor tweaks in more innovative companies. And in some cases, you may need to swap positions and responsibilities among team members.
Step 5: Implement Cloud And DevOps
The implementation step is, of course, the most fun, but it also comes with issues as well. To implement DevOps and cloud platforms, you need to do it in carefully planned stages. Start with development tools, then ops tools, and then move to the target cloud platform.
There will be issues, so be sure to mitigate as best as possible. Give your DevOps and cloud team plenty of time to problem-solve during the implementation process. It is definitely not an overnight move.
In Conclusion
Agility will help your business grow and be competitive in today’s age of digital innovation. Pairing DevOps with cloud using the above five steps can help you achieve maximum cloud success. There are certainly more cloud and DevOps to research, but the above will get you moving in the right direction.
What are your top steps for DevOps and cloud platform implementation success? How long did it take your company? And what was your implementation strategy? We would love to hear your company’s story.
