Cloud Ops

What is Cloud Operations (CloudOps)?

Cloud Operations?(CloudOps) is the practice of managing delivery, tuning, optimization, and performance of workloads and IT services that run in a cloud environment including multi, hybrid, in the data center and at the edge. CloudOps codifies procedures and best practices for cloud-based operational processes, much as?DevOps?codifies the same for application development and delivery processes.

Cloud Operations relies heavily on analytics to enhance visibility of elements of the cloud environment, providing the insight needed to control resources and run services efficiently.

For some organizations, CloudOps has replaced the network operations center (NOC) as IT operations have shifted from on-premises to cloud-based infrastructure. Just as the NOC monitored and managed the data center, CloudOps monitors, instruments, and manages VMs, containers and workloads that run in a cloud. Developers, IT operations and security all collaborate using CloudOps principles to meet business and technology goals.

Benefits of cloud operations

CloudOps offers a long list of benefits to organizations including:

• Accelerated automation.?CloudOps tools can simplify automation of a broad range of everyday tasks including provisioning servers and storage, application testing, monitoring and reporting, application builds, and security event remediation.
• Enhanced security.?Major hyperscale cloud providers utilize the industry’s best physical security and constantly monitor their infrastructure to help prevent against cybercrime or data exfiltration. Nearly every organization realizes security improvements when migrating to the cloud, keeping in mind that cloud security falls as much on the organization as it does on the cloud provider.
• Improved RPO/RTO.?Backup and data recovery was the initial use case for the public cloud and continues to be a strong driver for cloud migration. Backup and replication strategies can lower the recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) to near-zero, helping to ensure availability around the clock for an increasingly global user and customer base.
• Overall IT savings.?Since cloud services are pay-as-you-go, there large capital expenditures are eliminated, along with the need to purchase service contracts and constantly upgrade data center hardware to meet changing user demands. Additionally, eliminating data center infrastructure saves facility costs such as power, cooling, even real estate.
• On-demand scalability.?Seasonal or growth demands can be met with instant capacity increases, usually via self-service portal. Provisioning new virtual machines, physical servers, storage, even network bandwidth can all be done by the push of a button, enabling organizations to be more agile and meet demands head-on as they occur.
• Anywhere access.?Organizations can access cloud applications and resources any time, using nearly any device, from anywhere with an internet connection.
• Non-disruptive upgrades.?Infrastructure and software can both be upgraded or updated seamlessly, without service disruption enabling fixes to be applied or new functionality added while normal business operations continue.

What is the difference between DevOps and CloudOps?

Both DevOps and CloudOps are based on collaborative relationships between different groups in the organization.

DevOps practices deliver continues improvements in processes that enhance collaboration which leads to enhanced visibility throughout the software delivery lifecycle (SDLC) and helps reduce incidents that can disrupt IT operations or impact development schedules.

DevOps improvements can bubble throughout the organization, helping to bring more reliable software applications to fruition faster, which leads to improved performance for the organization as a whole. Ultimately, DevOps helps improve the user experience for employee and customers alike.

CloudOps encompasses cloud platform engineering principles, combining elements of cloud architecture, IT operations, application development, security, and regulatory compliance to enable organizations to manage cloud-based applications and services.