CloudOps and DevOps – the Two Most Important Ops in ‘XOps’!

BizOps, MarketingOps, CloudOps, DevOps, AIOps, MLOps, DataOps. As the name suggests, they are all cross-functional. Obviously, organizations are at different stages of maturity based on industry, size, age, culture, technology adoption, and budget. However, more and more organizations need the benefits provided by various Ops.

Similar to DevOps, various types of Ops are designed to accelerate processes and improve the quality of their delivery: software (DevOps); data (DataOps); AI models (MLOps); and analytical insights (AIOps). While some people think that different Ops types are important because the expertise required for each type is different, a few others think this is just hype, especially renaming existing content may add risks and hinder faster transfer of value.

XOps Began with DevOps

Agile software development practices have been bubbling up to the business for some time. Since the dawn of the millennium, business leaders have been told their companies need to be more agile just to stay competitive.

Meanwhile, many agile software development teams have adopted DevOps and increasingly they’ve gone a step further by embracing continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) which automates additional tasks to enable an end-to-end pipeline which provides visibility throughout and smoother process flows than the traditional waterfall handoffs. Like DevOps, DataOps, MLOps, and AIOps are cross-functional endeavors focused on continuous improvement, efficiency and process improvement.

Agile software development practices have been emerging in enterprises for some time. Business leaders have repeatedly been told that their companies need to be more agile to remain competitive. Simultaneously though, many agile software development teams have adopted DevOps to automate additional tasks, and adoption of Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) enables an end-to-end pipeline, thus providing visibility and smoothness to the entire process compared with the traditional waterfall methodologies. DevOps, CloudOps, DataOps, MLOps and AIOps are all cross-functional dedicated to continuous improvement, efficiency and process improvement. In this blog, we will focus on CloudOps and the benefits of cloud-based platforms.

What is CloudOps?

CloudOps is short for ‘Cloud (Computing) Operations’. Moreover, CloudOps is ‘the formalization of best practices and procedures that can make cloud-based platforms and the applications and data living in them run normally for a long period of time.’

CloudOps is essentially the crystallization of DevOps and traditional IT operations applied to cloud-based architectures. Most organizations before cloud computing and storage would maintain a network operations center (NOC). NOC is the physical location where IT professionals can manage and monitor network and server performance.

Many teams are now building services without touching the server hosting their services. But this does not eliminate the need for operations-it just means that alerts and monitoring need to be cloud-optimized. When providing new services or responding to events in production, software developers, IT operations, and security teams still need to work closely together.

Many teams are now building services without touching the server hosting their services. But this does not eliminate the need for operations-it just means that alerts and monitoring need to be cloud-optimized. When providing new services or responding to events in production, software developers, IT operations, and security teams still need to work closely together.

All of the above implies that CloudOps is not exclusive to DevOps practices. How can DevOps teams benefit from CloudOps then?

What Does CloudOps Offer DevOps Teams?

DevOps creates an agile process for the rapid delivery of reliable services. It does not eliminate the need for IT experts and software developers, but only brings them closer. Moreover, as containers, complex microservices and serverless functions become more and more common, teams need to find ways to speed up the migration without compromising stability and security.

This is where CloudOps and cloud computing can provide DevOps teams with speed, security and operational efficiency. There are several benefits of the cloud-based platforms, such as:

• Scalable Distributed and Stateless
  Capacity planning and asset management have been virtualized. You can quickly start a new server or delete unnecessary storage. You can set up rules for automatically setting up servers to keep up with demand and maintain uptime. In addition, CloudOps can help you monitor key performance indicators and take quick action anywhere, thereby increasing the flexibility and scalability of the underlying applications and overall infrastructure.
• Fault and latency tolerant
  Cloud-based applications and infrastructure are less prone to latency and error. Because cloud-centric applications and services can be abstracted from the underlying infrastructure, your system becomes more fault-tolerant. Basically, cloud-based tools can make your service more efficient.
• More uptime
  Since teams can use multiple independent processing nodes where each node can access data from several replicated databases for a single application, the services experience less downtime or outages. This is because your application(s) can likely pull the data from a different source in case a server goes down.
• Automated
  You can create a more powerful self-healing system and achieve more automation in every part of your Software Development Life Cycle. By using ‘Infrastructure as Code’, you can program more automated functions and use infrastructure to execute commands and tasks based on monitoring thresholds and other key performance indicators.
• Data Redundant
  In CloudOps, data can be better protected from failures. Cloud-based environments provide countless opportunities for data storage in multiple physical and logical locations-providing more failover options and protection against data loss. Data is stored in different locations and can be stored in many ways to help you eliminate single points of failure-reduce dependencies and build more flexible data pipelines.

CloudOps + DevOps

CloudOps can provide many advantages from a technical perspective. However, when combined with DevOps, it can not only improve the basic technology of applications and infrastructure, but also improve the process and maintenance/operations. Any team that wants to continuously deliver customer value needs continuous monitoring and improvement-whether their services are cloud-based or not.

Combining the ideals of DevOps with the technological improvements of CloudOps will lead to a faster CI/CD process, which is more in line with customer needs. We have reached a state where we need to think of how to make these Ops work in tandem as against pose a question of CloudOps vs DevOps.

Is XOps more Than CloudOps and DevOps or is XOps Hype Then?

One of the reasons not to pursue various forms of Ops is because it contradicts the technology trends. Traditionally, specialization was considered a good thing, but from a more modern perspective, IT roles are becoming more and more extensive, with organizations expecting employees to wear multiple hats as evident from the rise of full-stack developers or site reliability engineers. In fact, modern teams prefer having the right combination of skills more than anything else. Having the right functions is more important than what these functions are called. Just like DevOps and CloudOps, XOps is as real as it gets. Without industry wide standardization, we might see variations in its adoption by different organizations.

To know more about how you can make CloudOps and DevOps work together to improve the speed, security and operational efficiency of your teams, pls contact us today.

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