I’ve gone from recommending that you should have devops to you must have devops. At least, if a public cloud is in your future.
There are two fundamental reasons why cloud computing and devops are necessary complements.
First, the public clouds are all about automation, and so is devops. Devops takes advantage of orchestration systems that can autoprovision and autoscale, as well as proactively monitor the application workloads and data sets in the public clouds.
If you don’t automate the enterprise’s development process, you limit the value that public cloud provides. You need to automate end to end, including development, testing, deployment, and operations.
Half of enterprise development processes exist in a public cloud these days, and the other half should exist within the enterprise as devops processes, organization, and tool sets. I believe that they must exist.
Second, devops breeds better security for the cloud. Want to know what causes security breaches? It’s the lack of proactivity and the lack of dealing with security at the application level. These are the two primary culprits over the last few years.
In the olden days, we assumed that just locking the door would provide good-enough security. However, as information became relatively easy to get, we’ve had platform vulnerabilities continuously exposed.
In this new threat-rich environment, both counteractive and proactive patches and fixes are available for the platform as well as the applications.
Devops provides better security by bringing the notion of continuous improvement to cloud-based platforms and applications. If you do devops right, you test for security issues at both the application and the platform levels, you do automated penetration testing, and, for Pete’s sake, you make sure you apply the current patches and fixes to plug security gaps.
The end result is an environment in which platform, applications, and data sets are continuously improved every day. That makes your systems much less likely to have vulnerabilities that can be exploited when they’re deployed to a public cloud.
The links between devops and cloud computing are too hard to ignore. If you’re moving to the cloud, you’re moving to devops as well.