Total Guide to Private Cloud:
ZeroOps for Cloud on Prem
Managed Cloud, On-Premises or Anywhere, Delivered as a Service
Time to read: 28 minutes
2. Real ROI comes from apps (not ops)
As complex as modern enterprise cloud infrastructure is, it’s all just table stakes for what organizations really need to focus on: quickly creating and delivering applications that help the business win.
A poorly implemented private cloud can leave you with operational headaches –and constant labor to keep the cloud on its feet.. But it also distracts from the more important work of accelerating application development:
Building developer workflows
Creating standards and tooling for various application footprints
Resilience, security and access control
Disaster recovery, compliance, and self-service
For developers to maximally leverage their skills, you need a stable cloud foundation.
A failed private cloud effort – or a cloud effort that stops with the cloud and doesn’t guarantee that the cloud is serviceable to developers – can cut your business off from upside.
VIDEO: Cloud Native Data Center as the Future of Modern Infrastructure
Turn the problem upside down
A root cause of cloud woes is to think of your cloud as something that gets conceptualized from the bottom up.
Building it? Of course. You start with base infrastructure, hosts, substrate, cloud framework. But conceptually, it helps to visualize your cloud as developers do. Their ultimate, day-to-day goal (and yours) needs to be “just push your code” – and everything just works. ROI starts happening when your developers can do that.
Visualizing things this way reveals the stark truth: your “cloud platform project” is about much more than a platform. It’s about:
JUST PUSH YOUR CODE
A development toolchain and workflows that shape, secure, and accelerate software creation, packaging, testing, staging, deployment, and lifecycle management of production applications. Think of this as “the DevOps part.”
A mature and complete set of standardized tools, services, and APIs for helping applications secure themselves, enable observation, measure performance, become resilient, scale, defend against disasters, and so on. Think of this as “the SRE part.”
A cloud platform that is itself purpose engineered to minimize operating, security, and other headaches. Think of this as “the platform engineering part.”
Finding a Partner
But this requires a special kind of partner, who can bring to the table:
An integrated, open source software stack that solves all the infrastructure and platform problems around container orchestration and virtual machine provisioning across a host of operating systems and private cloud, public cloud, and bare metal infrastructures, all while maximizing freedom of choice and avoiding lock-in.
A single point for cloud lifecycle management – by your people, and your partner.
Deep cloud expertise, backing a broad set of managed service options, driven by SLAs and guaranteeing results, for engineering, customizing, and running this infrastructure so that you don’t need to (and you get to consume your cloud “as a service”).
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Additional bespoke and packaged services and solutions for overcoming challenges associated with most cloud efforts, such as:
— Building out and managing cloud-native CI/CD
— Automating common application types
— Modernizing and/or migrating legacy apps to the new platform
The immediate purpose of this suite is to speed ROI on the initial private cloud build. The longer-term purpose is to unblock innovation:
By making it easy to adopt technologies when you need them, with minimum friction: for example, you may begin with infrastructure-as-a-service, move to containerization, then simple orchestration (Swarm), then more sophisticated orchestration (Kubernetes), all within a unified solution schema that anticipates these changes.
By simplifying hybrid and multi-cloud efforts,letting you configure all-points-consistent clouds across diverse platforms like hosted bare metal, or even public clouds where these are useful.
