Empowering DevOps is one of the key areas of concern for enterprise IT decision-makers in 2020. It is also one of the chief reasons why many enterprises are turning to public cloud. “DevOps and cloud go hand in hand,” according to TechTarget, with DevOps being the essential ingredient in taking cloud computing “from a limited test environment to production within enterprise IT.”
With the right public cloud solution, enterprise DevOps teams can dramatically improve speed, agility and quality control. They can gain much faster access to the infrastructure they need, with automation to support continuous testing, integration and delivery. Developers can easily leverage innovation in the cloud, via containers, microservices, artificial intelligence, blockchain and other key technology trends.
While public cloud has been essential in the emergence of DevOps—and vice versa—there is always room for improvement. In this article we look at cloud solutions that make life easier for development and operations personnel, while improving quality control, speed to market and integration between legacy apps and next-generation cloud-native apps.
Marrying containers and VMs
One of the challenges in modernizing applications has been in using container technology in today’s highly virtualized environments. Virtual machines and containers have always been considered opposing technologies, but that no longer needs to be the case, specifically in VMware environments.
With the right technology platform, developers can confidently containerize certain components of an application while maintaining other parts of the application within a VM. This ability to containerize an application enables developers to use microservices to gain new insights and avoid the costs of completely rearchitecting an application.
This capability is achieved using a private, dedicated connection that bypasses the public Internet, enabling organizations to address application modernization requirements both on and off premises. It is offered as a feature within the IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions, called IBM Cloud Private Hosted on VMware vCenter Server.
Leveraging next-generation technology
As enterprise cloud adoption increases, cloud-native application development is growing rapidly. One of the big challenges is in integrating mission-critical applications with new cloud-native applications so the organization can gain maximum productivity and developers can have their VMs and containerized workloads running side by side.
This capability is available for the first time in IBM Cloud, via secured private network connectivity between IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions and the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service. The solution bypasses the public Internet and empowers faster development and easier collaboration within DevOps teams.
With this new capability, enterprise developers can modernize and extend their virtual applications by connecting them to next-generation apps using innovations such as AI and blockchain, which are built using the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service. Developers have been looking for a way to incorporate these new technologies into mission-critical applications, and now they can do it via public cloud services from IBM and VMware.
IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions: Bringing VMware Environments to the Public Cloud
This IDC White Paper highlights the strengths of the IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions and illustrates how it offers a secure and flexible path to public cloud and to broader digital transformation.
Download NowTaking the next step
Enterprises are under growing pressure to accelerate development cycles and ensure they have a path to building new cloud-native apps and modernizing legacy apps to support and empower digital transformation. “The pressure on organizations to innovate and fundamentally rethink how they operate internally and what technologies they embrace has ramped up over the past year,” IDC notes, adding that organizations that don’t embrace DevOps tooling, AI, machine learning and other advances “will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage in the future.”
This means leveraging the scalability, flexibility and portability of technologies such as containers, microservices, AI and others. Public cloud provides a fast and safe path for enterprise IT to empower its DevOps teams with the innovative technologies they need to accelerate development cycles and ensure quality control. But not all public cloud solutions are created equal.
Is your organization ready to take the next step forward in DevOps innovation? Please visit IBM Cloud to learn more about how our partnership with VMware can help you take DevOps to the next level.
