Current State of DevOps in the Cloud-native Era
DevOps and Cloud
Cloud adoption has been on the rise regardless of the use private clouds or public clouds, and many organizations nowadays operate their application services in multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud environments using private clouds, public clouds and/or on-premises data centers. This shift to multi-cloud deployments enables more resilient and scalable service infrastructure by efficiently using available network and system resources across all global sites, that is typically managed and operated with an automation approach by the network (NetOps) team.
In turn, applications have also been shifting from monolithic architectures to agile and scalable architectures with a cloud-native and microservices approach. Cloud-native application services, or container-based applications, are decentralized service functions (processes), deployed as microservices on elastic infrastructure. This approach helped develop a process called continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) as it can easily streamline a workflow of development and testing and then production. This is a fundamental piece of the DevOps workflow process and allows developers and operations teams to build and manage services in a flexible and dynamic manner on any of cloud environment.
While multi-cloud deployments along with cloud-native architecture bring benefits for services in many ways, this indeed increases complexity for managing and operating application delivery because service and system resources are distributed globally and huge number of containers/workloads in many different types are running across multiple clouds and data centers. This obviously requires collaboration between NetOps and DevOps team to optimize the operation, thus motivate organizations to move towards software-defined data center (SDDC) architectures, enabling an orchestration and automation approach using DevOps tool chains.
As noted in a report commissioned by the Cloud-native Computing Foundation
“Cloud-native technologies empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds. Containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs exemplify this approach.
These techniques enable loosely coupled systems that are resilient, manageable, and observable. Combined with robust automation, they allow engineers to make high impact changes frequently and predictably with minimal toil.”
Automate Multi-cloud Application Delivery Using HashiCorp Terraform & Consul
This webinar session demonstrates application network automation using A10 Thunder® ADC’s integration with DevOps tools, featuring integration with HashiCorp Consul & Terraform and support for Oracle Cloud for smart hybrid/multi-cloud deployment.
Key Takeaways from the A10 Transcend DevOps Roundtable
In our A10 Transcend DevOps roundtable panel discussion, a variety of panelists discussed the current DevOps trends. Key takeaways included:
- Understanding current DevOps trends around shifts to multi-cloud and cloud-native environments
- What are the motivations for building a modern application service, besides the COVID-19 pandemic
- Why and what is accelerating the adoption of DevOps tools, and the continuous delivery workflow
- Challenges and concerns that operators including NetOps and DevOps are facing, and ideas to overcome them
- The values and benefits DevOps tools like HashiCorp’s tools (e.g., Network Infrastructure Automation (NIA)/ Consul-Terraform-Sync) can bring
- A10’s approach to ease automation and integration with DevOps tools like HashiCorp Consul and Terraform for lifecycle management and service monitoring
- Predictions and what’s coming next
Panelists included:
- Tom Petrocelli – Amalgam Insights – Research Fellow
- Anubhav Mishra – HashiCorp – Technical Advisor to the CTO
- Rishi Sampat – A10 Networks – Sr. Principal Architect
- Taka Mitsuhata – A10 Networks – Sr. Manager of Technical Marketing
- Paul Nicholson – A10 Networks – Sr. Director of Product Marketing (Moderator)