Large evaluation of DEVOPS tool model for cloud computing vendors

Software as a service (SaaS) is probably the most compelling and profitable of the three cloud computing business models, as it provides customers with the ability to replace the cost of most technical support types, and can be sold directly to consumers. But the success of SaaS is not smooth sailing. Without the use of DevOps tools and principles, the task of building and maintaining SaaS applications will quickly become an operational nightmare for cloud computing providers. The biggest source of these problems is the automation of a lifecycle-wide process for services deployed in a cloud computing environment.

Cloud computing requires a new configuration strategy

In the early stages of cloud computing, much of the work of SaaS deployments must be done by hand or by developing internal automation software. For operators, the associated costs are rather high, and their customers have an unstable service experience, but a new strategy is likely to reverse these trends.

The traditional way for cloud providers to design their services is to develop their own running tools, which means that the tools must be customized to fit the requirements of each application or application component. This is a completely inefficient and clumsy process. Updating this pattern requires vendors to develop tools for cloud computing during application development, integrating development and operations into the same lifecycle. This concept is called devops, and the term is derived from development (Development) and operations (twist). DevOps tools and principles are not limited to cloud computing, but they appear to be in the age of cloud computing.

All DevOps applications are a combination of a configuration engine and a set of application programming interfaces (APIs), while APIs connect applications to manage interfaces for setting up cloud computing services, private servers, and network management systems. Application requirements describe a driver configuration engine that, at runtime, can develop administrative commands based on application descriptions. These commands can be set to the application so that the application can execute correctly.

In a mature devops environment, developers can develop configuration instructions based on applications. However, the DevOps tools and methods are now being used to allow developers to generate configuration instructions for applications that have been developed.

DevOps Tools: Scripting and container contention

The DevOps tool has two possible patterns: one is the script-only mode and the other is the container mode.

The DevOps tool based on scripting mode will make Linux users very familiar, because they allow commands to be saved and run with replaceable parameters. Most popular commercial configuration automation products and management automation products are part of this scripting based paradigm. These include Microsoft's Windows Azure PowerShell CmdLets, Amazon Web services Cloudformation, and an Open-source Opscode development project chef.

The container pattern is an abstraction that creates an application, which we can call a container, an object. The configuration engine then processes the container to make it easier to publish commands. Of the many container based devops tools, only one is widely used: open source projects canonical The juju of the company's development. The use of JuJu container mode can achieve maximum commitment.

The benefits of JuJu

The advantage of container mode is that it allows cloud computing providers to create a reusable control that describes the application deployment and lifecycle and runs when needed.

This is much different from scripting patterns, which require vendors to translate application requirements (also known as domain-specific languages, DSL) into parameters that can be replaced by scripting programs. This may require a script program to track changes to the application to ensure that the application still works correctly.

In comparison, the goal of JuJu is to make translation tasks a purely policy statement. This means that cloud computing providers can potentially give users a role in customizing and setting, which makes the maintenance of application descriptions easier for vendors.

The fact that JuJu is open source also makes it suitable for cloud providers who want to customize tools to support their own service plans, but there are a number of other open source customizable DevOps tools and projects that are challenging juju status. The representative is the Dell-developed Crowbar, OpenStack Donabe project, and canonical Ubuntu Orchestra. While open source enhancements are always a choice, cloud providers will ultimately benefit from those comprehensive devops tools that provide the right functionality and focus on developing scripts and containers.

Using the DevOps tool to sell SaaS

Cloud-Computing vendors should start implementing their DevOps strategy by setting DevOps configuration requirements for applications as they develop applications. This typically involves all configuration rules, including software instances, database instances, and multiple settings rules for network addressing. The capabilities of different devops tools are different in these areas, so it is important to review application requirements for project features and work plans to ensure that everything is moving in the right direction.

Although recently developed cloud computing applications do not follow the DevOps model, it also helps to validate that evaluation DevOps tools provide authoring template capabilities (i.e., to describe deployment beyond the development process) and to integrate with existing applications.

While the greatest value of the DevOps tool is the development of SaaS applications that run within the cloud computing vendor's own infrastructure, it is also used to help customers migrate applications to the infrastructure that is service (IaaS) or platform as a service (PaaS), And it has the potential to consolidate multiple vendors in a cloud computing alliance. Because all of these applications are less fault tolerant and have a high potential cost of human support, widespread use of devops in cloud computing can greatly increase cloud computing profitability and customer satisfaction. This is absolutely critical in an increasingly competitive cloud computing market.