How can you maintain vendor independence in a cloud-based DevOps environment?

If you want to avoid being locked into cloud service providers, you might consider using open-source solutions and formats. I share some of the options you can find useful: ? Version control: Git ? API protocol: REST or gRPC ? Container runtime: Containerd (Used by Docker in the background) ? Container orchestration: Kubernetes ? Monitoring: Prometheus ? Logging: Fluentd ? Infrastructure as code: OpenTofu (Open source fork of Terraform)

Open Source is where I tend to look to remain independent. You also tend to benefit from better community and more prolific tooling by going down this path than if you integrate with proprietary tooling. That said, if you cannot avoid proprietary (or it gives you a better solution), abstraction of this layer as you might abstract a proprietary API in a library can help here, separating your teams' implementations from the specifics of the tooling itself, and allowing you to adapt if you need to move tools in the future.

To avoid being dependent on a vendor, 1. Choose open source software solutions. 2. Loosely coupled services. 3. Containerization

Utilize services from several cloud providers by adopting a multi-cloud strategy. For deployment, use containerization technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes. Establish vendor-neutral infrastructure definitions to facilitate cloud provider switching. Select tools and services that are independent of cloud providers. Steer clear of vendor-specific APIs to make sure your cloud platform will work with them. Think options that make data movement between cloud providers simple. Select DevOps tools that work with various cloud providers. Being independent of vendors enables you to select affordable options and change suppliers as necessary. Training, skill development, and consider any downtime, application reconfiguration and data migration.

In my view, there are some of the points that needs to be consider: Standardized APIs: Choose cloud services with well-documented and standardized APIs for easy migration. Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Implement IaC practices to define infrastructure in a vendor-agnostic way. Containerization: Use containerization (e.g., Docker) for portability across cloud providers. Multi-Cloud Strategy: Distribute workloads across multiple cloud providers to avoid vendor lock-in. Decouple Services: Design applications to be loosely coupled, reducing dependence on specific cloud services.

Maintaining vendor independence in a cloud-based DevOps environment involves adopting interoperable tools, using standardized interfaces, and avoiding proprietary features. Additionally, implementing abstraction layers and designing for portability can help mitigate dependencies on specific cloud providers. Regularly reassessing and adjusting your toolchain based on evolving requirements also contributes to vendor independence.

Opting for open-source and on-premise solutions, hosted on your own infrastructure, is an effective strategy to avoid vendor lock-in during infrastructure development. While this approach may increase setup time and necessitate ongoing maintenance, its significant advantage lies in the control it offers. Hosting services in-house ensures that data remains within your control, a critical factor for maintaining compliance with various security standards and certifications. This control often outweighs the initial setup and maintenance challenges.

Another way to reduce or become independent on using specific cloud provider or cloud specifier platform where we would be working is that designing the system in which cloud should work with these set of tools , For instance, For my build and test tool , i would use Jenkins or Travis to integrate with Aws, which inturns helps in binding easier to work with , for implement in my ci and cd tools with delivery pipelines.

Devops And Cloud Has Been a Long Way Providing Efficient Way To Save Your Resources From Excessive Use And Also Has Been Able To Make Best Use Of Your Resources In Less Time. Devops Tools like Jenkins, Docker , Ansible Plays A Vital Role In Contributing Efficient Resource Management.

For cost cutting and to being independent from singlely depended vendors is that to figure which cloud platform provides best of cost on each services which is used here for provisioning and integrating, because anytime we can change and configure cloud according to our preferences but what matters here is that there will be rational services which are available to work in but hidden costs on working with these services what it makes in switching and going across for different cloud services that has been existed for long time but with the pratices of devops and devsecops as principles adoratrices that supports in cutting the cost and also provides the benefits in implementing security pratices as well.

Don't forget to evaluate your team's knowledge and capacity before jumping into any benefits&cost calculations. A simple issuance of vendor's new price list might have quite dramatic impact on any of your calculations, resulting in "emergency evacuation" of partial or entire product portfolio. Just keep it in mind along with similar opportunities for stressful life.

Decoupling components and adhering to microservices architecture enable you to replace or integrate new services without significant disruptions. This design principle fosters an environment where components can be independently sourced from different vendors, promoting adaptability and reducing reliance on any single provider.

Based on my experience, one of the significant challenges encountered when working with any cloud service platform is the need to recreate infrastructure. I recommend enhancing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform or similar options. These tools allow for thorough testing and version control. In the DevOps domain, where change is a constant, preserving independence from a specific cloud provider is more than just a strategic move; it embodies a mindset

Promthesis and Grafana Has Been Doing That Monitoring Part Since A Long Time As, They Are So Much Efficient In making Strong Monitoring Dashboards.

We ran into this one our project. The queries to collect the source data were very complex and some did not have the right indexes on the joins. The original time estimate to complete the migration was over a year! Queries had to be re-written to use index columns in the source database and we were able to get the conversion time down to 1 month, without compromising the integrity of the data.

Don't forget to optimise for price and put together a good set of arguments to keep the licenses, CPU time and disk space also for next period of time - after current subscriptions do expire. The added value of tons of old logs, myriads of dashboards, terabytes of processed data for tracing, CPU time for all these puzzle pieces might be hard to argue with a department whose main purpose of existence is to make stakeholders happy - obviously based on profit maximisation.

The tools per se don't do the things, some times could be a single "pain" of glass, there need to be implemented a good plan for monitoring then observability , define when is a symptom a performance degraded an outage, for this you need to define severity plan, adequate threshold to meausure, monitoring accordingly.

Devops and cloud technology are often equated, and to some extent they are. This is because, in addition to CI/CD, the DevOps mindset naturally promotes continuous learning, which is essential for the successful use of cloud technologies. It is therefore important to create a good working environment and culture that allows the necessary freedom to experiment and learn in day-to-day business. The 3 ways of devops show a good way to achieve this.

If you are going into a Software as a Service solution as we were, platform independence wasn’t possible. But, I do have proposals in with the client to redo some services built “on platform” into REST services, so the destination can be portable. Modularity is a clear key to this.

Maintaining vendor independence in a cloud-based DevOps environment involves some key strategies: 1. Multi-Cloud Strategy 2. Abstraction Layers and Standards 3. Containerization and Orchestration 4. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) 5. Decoupling Services 6. Continuous Evaluation and Flexibility If we implement the above strategies then we can avoid vendor lock-in.

I want to draw attention to some of the tradeoffs of adopting a vendor agnostic technical strategy - Training and skillset diversification challenges - Slower adoption of new features from specific cloud vendors - Potential performance trade offs due to the complexity and generality that cannot take advantage of a specific providers feature set or optimizations - Maintaining compatibility across several providers can increase complexity in architecting the system and overheads for maintenance, operational overhead, training, development and testing

Any cloud devops platform now support Git based single-source-of-truth approach. This will enable organizations to maintain their deployment code identical irrespective of the provider. Tools like Kustomize, Helm charts, ArgoCD or even plain shell scripts can all be maintained without reinventing the wheel.

Consider allowing yourself to be "locked in". Each vendor will have applications and offerings that don't have an equivalent in another vendor. If you architect your application to have a reusable core with vendor specific extensions if you were ever forced to switch cloud providers you wouldn't lose all your codebase. Completely vendor agnostic isn't always the best or most realistic approach.