Is CloudOps The Same As DevOps

Overview

It’s a known fact that cloud computing has a lot to offer to businesses. The cloud computing market size is expected to reach $354 billion by 2022. Cloud computing includes business processes, platforms, software, infrastructure, management, security, and almost everything that a cloud service provider delivers.

However, the credibility of the cloud framework largely depends upon how the services are maintained to meet customer expectations. The success of cloud computing largely depends on whether the system is secure and compliant, can the operational costs be optimized, and what additional benefits can be availed. It’s not enough that the IT Ops team manages the cloud-based functions and activities. To make this a success, it has to be a collaborative effort amidst IT operations, cloud architecture, security & compliance, etc.

Cloud Ops and Dev Ops are two distinct systems that have some overlapping zones. One of the fallacies of similar-sounding words is that the readers easily misunderstand these. Let’s try to tell them apart by listing out their functionalities.

CloudOps

Well, we already know IT operations include all the activities involved in the management of the delivery and optimization of IT services. Now let’s consider the same management happening within the context of a cloud architecture where a cloud Cloud Center of Excellence (COE) replaces a Network Operations Center (NOC). The cloud COE comprises the Cloud Operations (CloudOps) team that includes experts from various cloud domains like cloud architecture, cloud services, IT operations, security, and compliance.

More and more organizations are moving away from on-site servers to cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, Oracle Cloud, and so on. Third-party cloud service providers give the advantage of scalability and flexibility. Downtime is considerably reduced as these third parties have multiple data centers. Organizations can configure these servers according to their requirements and implement responsive load balancing to meet changing demands. When relying on third-party providers, organizations must evaluate the security considerations of storing information in the cloud.  

CloudOps and DevOps are not mutually exclusive terms as the Development and Operations teams collaborate closely in a CloudOps environment. CloudOps is an umbrella under which DevOps functions.

Responsibilities of a CloudOps Team
When an organization decides to move its IT operations to the cloud infrastructure, it will free up its internal infrastructure. It also means the organization must set up a dedicated cloud team that can manage the infrastructure, keep it up and running, and maintain cloud-based apps diligently. This process requires the right choice of tools to monitor as well as automate the workload balance. We need to understand that for any organization that wants to migrate to cloud computing, infrastructure resources that are under/over-utilized and are not managed properly could significantly raise the overall budget. Hence, it is crucial to put together an efficient CloudOps team.

Here are the tasks performed by a CloudOps Team:

• Manage cloud configuration.
• Allocate resources.
• Optimize the performance capacity.
• Manage the compliance liabilities.
• Ensure service-level agreements (SLAs) are met.

Principles of Cloud Operations
The reliability of cloud infrastructure depends on efficient processes and procedures that facilitate abstraction, automated provisioning, policy, and process automation. These are the four principles of Cloud Operations. Let’s understand these in details:

• Abstraction
  This approach ensures that you have a single point of control over all the applications and services running in the cloud. Hence you build a centralized system to manage all the cloud machine instances, storage instances, security, network, and governance.
• Automated Provisioning
  You can provision machine instances on the cloud in two ways—automated provisioning and self-provisioning. Self-provisioning is where the cloud admin allows the cloud users to allocate their own machines and track their usage. However, automated provisioning automates the applications to request resources when required and de-provision them when not needed.
• Policy-Driven
  User management policies are pivotal in a cloud infrastructure. All users cannot have access to everything on the cloud. For this, organizations must come up with well-formulated and well-drafted cloud usage policies. These policies also administer resource allocation to ensure a better return of investment (ROI).
• Process Automation
  Automation in Cloud Operations is non-negotiable. It is what makes cloud infrastructure so efficient. Customers will buy a cloud-based product only if it is secure, reliable, and efficient. Artificial intelligence and machine learning play essential roles in task automation.

DevOps

DevOps is a term used to depict the strategic collaboration between Development and Operations teams. To understand DevOps better, let’s look at DevOps as the common functional space between Development, Quality Assurance, and Technology Operations. This ensures that the common goal of developers, operation folks, and testers remains to be that of producing a stable, innovative, and reliable product through efficient collaboration.

Principles of DevOps
DevOps thrives on three principles–continuous delivery, continuous feedback, and continuous improvement. The infinity sign often symbolizes DevOps to indicate it is a non-stop, ongoing process. Let’s understand the three principles a little better:

• Continuous Delivery - The basic flow of continuous delivery shows the process flow from the development to the QA to IT Operations and finally to the customers. This defines DevOps and is implemented through automated systems. These automated systems ensure the application is stored and systematically deployed from version control.
• Continuous Feedback - The feedback process happens through all the stages of the value stream. This ensures that bugs are detected early on and fixed at the earliest, thereby fostering faster detection and recovery. Continuous feedback ensures that only deployable code reaches the production.
• Continuous Improvement - This establishes a culture of innovation, risk-taking, and high trust. It is through constant experimentation that Continuous Delivery and Continuous Feedback can be made more efficient and mature. This is the main focus of Continuous Improvement.

Conclusion

DevOps is a part of CloudOps and not the other way to reiterate the idea we started with. The continuous integration, improvement, feedback, and implementation tasks that happen as a part of DevOps make CloudOps incredibly efficient.

DevOps strives to bring the Development and Operations team into a close collaboration. While, CloudOps focuses on high availability, reduced downtime, and continuous operation in a public cloud.

Now we have products like Copado that make Release Management extremely fast and seamless. These are release management automation tools that are a must-have for all organizations that use SAAS applications like Salesforce.