Delivering applications faster – focusing on business value, spending less time and resources on ‘ops,’ and avoiding lock-in – requires an optimized stack of open-source-derived components, plus know-how and commitment to guarantee results
Many organizations still expect classic accounting and potential cost benefits from cloud: CapEx turns to OpEx, resources are consumed on an as-needed basis, speed and agility are boosted by allocating virtual resources using software. But hopes for dramatic ROI are seldom fulfilled – as InfoWorld and the Wall Street Journal recently reported, cloud costs are rising: in some cases, unexpectedly quickly.
Financial services is encountering all these challenges as forces compelling and accelerating the transition to cloud grow stronger. This video from Accenture highlights a few of the operational and cultural frictions banks contend with: including changes in posture around responsibilities for regulatory compliance, difficulty staffing critical engineering roles with people who have “done a cloud transition for a bank, before,” and indecisiveness in the face of complexity: How do you undertake a cloud transition? What should it look like? Who do we need to make it all work?
Addressing matters below the “application horizon line” with a suite of open-source-based, pre-integrated, flexible-but-opinionated solutions can put organizations much closer to realizing ROI from their aggregate cloud efforts. Still, the effort of managing all these environments and technology stacks is both daunting and non-strategic – stealing time, headcount, expertise, and resources away from focusing on the work that pays the bills: applications development and production application ops.
ZeroOps is a new model for onsite/multisite remote managed services, where Mirantis employs its purpose-engineered technology and tested best practices, along with its globally-distributed bench of cloud experts and smart automation, to deliver the platforms and solutions you need, where you need them, both below and above the application horizon line. Working with Mirantis’ open source-based, integrated infrastructure and platform operations technologies – all tuned to enable remote observability and intervention – your multi-platform, multi-infrastructure cloud estates can literally work “as a service” in a ZeroOps regime.
Note that while there are benefits associated with adopting the full component stack, ZeroOps can be effectively delivered in more constrained ways, as well. In fact, Mirantis is esteemed by clients with narrow requirements for quickly adapting individual products for secure remote management.
The problem, said famed cloud analyst Stephen J. Vaughan-Nichols in a recent Cloud Native and Coffee interview with Shaun O’Meara, Global Field CTO at Mirantis, is that – whether we’re talking about proprietary private or public clouds – replatforming applications onto virtual machines, while frequently necessary and often challenging, isn’t nearly enough. Organizations today are challenged to use “cloud technology” (actually many interdependent technologies) to solve what looks like many different problems:
To leverage private clouds, public clouds, edge clusters, and other infrastructures.
To provide cloud-native, container-oriented platforms like Kubernetes and Swarm for go-forward, cloud-native development and production.
To provide cloud-native, container-oriented platforms like Kubernetes and Swarm for go-forward, cloud-native development and production.
To provide cloud-native, container-oriented platforms like Kubernetes and Swarm for go-forward, cloud-native development and production.
All this happens, furthermore, below what Mirantis calls the “application horizon line.” 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.
Worse, building infrastructure and platforms “below the application horizon line” is often taken on in a piecemeal way. IT organizations will do a lot of do-it-yourself – different teams, locations, goals, standards – exploring a range of technologies, hiring sophisticated and technically-specialized headcount to drive build efforts and solve point problems around networking, storage, and other areas. And, after usually years of effort, they end up with siloed systems, sometimes with siloed staffs, paying a lot for functionally-proprietary solutions to parts of their platform problem (VMware, OpenShift, and so on), and administering what amounts to multiple, disconnected, legacy-or-soon-to-be-legacy platforms – all hard to update, secure, observe, scale – doing so with bare-minimum support from vendors.
As a result, these organizations never end up universally solving (or in some cases, even attempting to solve) the core problems of centralized administration and on-demand platform provisioning for developers and application ops. Nor do they focus skills and headcount on accelerating software development or supporting application-layer DevOps in standardized ways – except (see below) by investing … sometimes deeply … in additional, effectively-proprietary solutions that are inflexible and hard to modify. So they end up spending way too much, while still starving the application-layer business-critical path for resources it needs to excel.
Gaining efficiency means leveraging centralized automation in every layer of an increasingly-complex multi-platform stack, achieving speed, consistency, predictability, and gaining the ability to host and administer applications of many types (VM-oriented, containerized, cloud native) seamlessly across several-to-many infrastructures.
Mirantis Container Cloud is a Kubernetes-hosted solution engineered to work as the foundation of such a stack: administering everything below what we call the “application horizon line.” MCC aggregates tools manually (webUI) or automatically (API):
Provision and observe bare-metal, hosted bare-metal (Equinix), private cloud, and popular public cloud infrastructures (AWS, Azure) and services.
Deploy, monitor, observe, and lifecycle manage Mirantis Kubernetes Engine (Kubernetes orchestration) clusters in Gov/Mil/Fintech-secure, highly-available, performant, and consistent configurations that can be:
Updated continuously, scaled, and access-managed from the MCC central point of authority, policy, and governance.
Delivered rapidly and flawlessly, on-demand, on any supported infrastructure, in validated configurations for use in dev, test, and production.
Additionally, atop the Kubernetes substrate, MCC can deploy and provide observability for Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes (MOSK) – a hardened, containerized-control-plane OpenStack distribution that provides extremely full-featured, open source infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS - virtual machine-oriented cloud, comparable to VMware) in a way that leverages Kubernetes’ powerful features to provide high performance and self-healing resilience for the IaaS layer.
Enabled by default observability of MCC itself, ensuring continued health of the centralized point of platform operations.
MCC is engineered to centralize and provide a common point for manual (webUI) and automated (API) administration and observation for all infrastructures and platforms, and also – because it’s securely multi-tenant – provides secure, policy-manageable self-service, everywhere. It thus solves, in principle, all problems below the “application horizon line”:
MCC provides a host of dependable self-service capabilities to DevOps and individual teams developing, observing, and operating cloud native containerized and virtual-machine-based applications (for example, the ability to automate Blue/Green deployments in production).
MCC provides platform engineers, SREs, security engineers, regulatory governance, and other central pools of expertise with tools they need to provide standards, lock down and protect enterprise assets, manage by policy, solve problems, audit compliance, and help developers move fast with less risk.
To provide this high level of integration and consistency, MCC assembles and coordinates a host of open-source-based technologies and solutions (including Mirantis Kubernetes Engine, Mirantis Container Runtime (FIPS 140-2 validated), Mirantis Secure Registry (scanning and image signing), Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes (MOSK), and Mirantis StackLight (comprehensive open source observability and metrics based on Prometheus, Grafana, Kibana, OpenSearch, and other broadly-accepted and reliable open source standard components).
The Mirantis technical solution stack thus provides the benefits of open source – rapid, community-driven improvements, transparent security standards, absence of proprietary requirements and other forms of lock-in, significant flexibility of configuration – while also providing tested, opinionated solutions that work together reliably at very large scales and are designed to reduce time-to-results for initial deployment, lifecycle management and scaling, extension to new hardware and clouds, and all other aspects of operations. The solution stack is also engineered to facilitate comprehensive remote operations by Mirantis (see ZeroOps, below).
Learn more about Mirantis Container Cloud
Learn more about Mirantis Kubernetes Engine
Learn more about Swarm vs. Kubernetes
With MCC and its companion products helping to solve platform and infrastructure challenges below the application horizon line, users are freed to focus resources and cycles above the line – on accelerating what really matters: software development and delivery.
Many IT organizations strive to do this, but adopt a piecemeal approach here, as well – picking from among proprietary PaaS and PaaS-like offerings that end up expensive, constraining, and indifferently-supported. Mirantis believes a more cost-effective and impactful approach combines open source components, productized, along with proactive support, insightful consulting, and targeted services. Applied in different ways, this strategy enables Mirantis to scale managed services effectively, providing guaranteed results at low, and in most cases, predictable prices.
Mirantis provides comprehensive application modernization services using a mature, best-practices framework, plus AI-based methods for interrogating and mapping app structure and dependencies. Combined, our techniques enable on the order of 6x greater delivery speed than conventional methods – up to hundreds of important applications converted to modern, cloud native, scalable, easier to operate forms in a matter of months.
Learn about Application Modernization
Lens, an open source tool sponsored by Mirantis, is the world’s most popular Kubernetes IDE. Lens runs on any desktop, any OS; permitting developers and operators to access and manage multiple clusters, deploy from permissioned Helm repositories, drill down into and iterate over abstractions, components, and containers, live. All while increasing speed and eliminating the need to memorize and apply complex kubectl commands to extract information, and complex aids like jsontool to parse and manage outputs. Developers can save up to 20% of productive time iterating changes with Lens versus conventional methods.
Lens Pro, a companion service, enables rapid, secure access by teams to Kubernetes environments, and provides numerous quality of life features, including quickstart local dev clusters on local machines such as developer laptops. Developers can provision local Kubernetes clusters (with different profiles) with Lens Desktop Pro for learning and local development; it also enables container image scanning and CVE reporting. Developers can start, stop and configure clusters with a click of a button.
Providing continuous integration and delivery tooling as part of a comprehensive end to end developer workflow is fundamental. It speeds delivery of new features (daily, or several-times-daily deployments become possible and even routine) and enables new levels of control and policy management via secure software supply chains. But deciding among a plethora of tools and SaaS services, integrating pipelines, and maintaining and improving CI/CD through inevitable project and technology changes is hard and time-consuming. Doing it on multiple host and/or target platforms, even harder.
Mirantis Lens has “productized” design, build, and management of custom CI/CD workflows, tuned to your requirements, and using your preferred components. Gain the expertise of a global bench of CI/CD and software development automation specialists for a predictable price.
Learn more about Lens Autopilot
Platform-as-a-Service sounds like a great idea, until it traps you in an inflexible, hard-or-impossible-to-customize environment and way of working. Developers sometimes feel there must be an (even) easier way: “after all, we’re just building web apps, here.”
Mirantis agrees. We believe that open-source derived frameworks can accomplish the same goals as PaaS: abstract the environment, provide a range of services enabling access management, ingress management, session and connectivity management, autoscaling, and so on, but can do so without the restrictions, inflexibility, and much of the cost.
For example, Amazee.io – a Mirantis subsidiary – makes Lagoon, a framework for writing, composing, deploying, operating, and automating a range of popular web application design patterns based on popular and performant open source components like Headless Drupal and WordPress amongst others.
Learn more about Amazee.io and Lagoon
Learn how Lagoon enables active/standby deployments
Another increasingly-viable alternative to heavy PaaS is lightweight serverless computing, which enables creation of (chains of) simple, containerized functions to accomplish a wide range of complex tasks – the platform is almost completely abstracted away to input/output, and provides simple-to-implement autoscaling and other features.
Numerous open source solutions for serverless computing on Kubernetes exist, and Mirantis has considerable familiarity and experience with the most popular of these, like KNative.
Gaining reliable ROI from cloud – focusing on apps, not Ops – depends on three main factors:
Access to an integrated software stack, based in open source to avoid lock-in, forged on a Kubernetes substrate for resilience and updateability, that solves all the infrastructure and platform problems around container orchestration and virtual machine provisioning across a host of private cloud, public cloud, and bare metal infrastructures, and provides a centrally-administered, all-points-consistent set of options for modern application hosting.
A single point for platform deployment, self-service, platform administration and scaling, access control, security, observability, and automation.
A broad set of managed service options, driven by SLAs and guaranteeing results, that engineer, customize, and run this infrastructure so that you don’t need to.
Gain back the gift of time to drive the parts of your business that really matter. Contact us.
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