Many organizations across the world are on their cloud journey with the objective to better utilize the next generation of cloud native offerings that can manage cloud operations powered by DevOps. Today, their managed services will require a new tooling architecture that can meet the many demands of cloud services offered by cloud service providers (CSPs) like Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The traditional toolsets are based on static IT environments which come with pre-defined set of rules. And therefore, it becomes all the more critical for next-generation managed services to address the dynamic nature of cloud-based services with a tool set that covers:
Cloud Resource Lifecycle Management
With cloud environments becoming critical component of the next-gen managed services scope, one of the key tools required is a cloud resource lifecycle management. For example, AWS Management Console allows for AWS native resources to be managed from a single pane of glass. For enterprises that manage a hybrid cloud, VMWare vRealize Automation (vRA) is a good example that allows for private and public cloud such as AWS resources to be managed from a single pane of glass. Next-gen managed services will need such a platform as part of their tooling strategy that can offer end-to-end lifecycle management capabilities.
DevOps Lifecycle Management
As more enterprises demand an increased frequency of application releases to help them quickly differentiate their services for their end customers, DevOps becomes more critical than ever. The DevOps lifecycle, which was historically part of software development life cycle (SDLC), is now a critical process that integrates into the next gen managed services through the continuous integration (CI) CI/ continuous development (CD) pipeline. With public cloud providers such as AWS, tools such as AWS CodePipeline help with defining the CI/CD workflows along with other AWS services like AWS CodeBuild and AWS CodeDeploy. Enterprise customers also have choices, such as Jenkins, Octopus, and other third-party CI/CD tools, which integrate with public cloud providers such as AWS.
Availability and Performance Monitoring of Dynamic Workloads
With cloud resources being dynamic in nature, traditional availability and performance monitoring tools do not have the ability to manage non-static environments. A new breed of tools is needed to manage such cloud resources using non-traditional techniques like an agent-based approach. Public cloud providers such as AWS provide native tools like Amazon CloudWatch that collect metrics, logs, and events from over 70 AWS services to help monitor the availability and performance of application and infrastructure. These tools are critical when monitoring workloads that use server-less computing like AWS Lambda. In addition, there are third party tools, such as Datadog, that help monitor public cloud services such as AWS and others.
Cloud Usage and Cost Management
One of the most important aspect of next Gen managed services is Cloud governance, specifically around usage and cost management, if left un-managed will result in increased cloud costs. The onus of managing these escalating cloud costs is on the managed service providers. They need tools to better understand the usage and cost of services such as AWS to provide recommendations around how to optimize it using various options. These options include changing the billing options, capacity (allocated) optimization options, time of day usage options, and so on. Tools such as Cloudchekr help next-gen managed service providers to optimize cloud usage and spend for cloud services. In turn, this helps their customers maximize the benefits of cloud and enable long-term adoption and confidence.
Automation
While automation is a critical component of services delivered on cloud, next-gen managed services is dependent on a strong automation platform that drives self-managed IT services. This requires AIOps and orchestration tools that can intelligently identify service events and failures and use orchestrators to remediate and/or resolve them. Tech Mahindra’s AIOps platform, TACTiX, and our AIOps visualization platform, Fixstream, offer such capabilities to work with private and public cloud environments such as AWS.
With a clear cloud adoption strategy, organization can utilize the resources available on cloud to build an environment that is faster, cost-effective, self-healable, and highly secure.
