IT companies how to better study cloud computing

Almost all developers love cloud computing because cloud computing makes their work easier. Infrastructure and operations should not resist this trend, but should try to accept it. Forrester's recent report provides some tips for controlling cloud computing.

Here's a Forrester report that says "Cloud computing opens up a new era in IT responsiveness and efficiency," a general description of how IT organizations should deploy and control cloud computing, and offers IT companies some relevant advice.

The report is divided into two parts:

1. Application engineers and software engineers should be how to deal with

2.IT IT infrastructure and operations should be how to respond, so that the entire enterprise through cloud computing to meet their needs

Abandon concerns and accept cloud computing

Cloud computing is what software engineers expect. Public cloud computing (which basically means Amazon cloud computing services) enables rapid resource access, high productivity, and cheap development. With these features, the developer's job easier. If an organization's private cloud does not provide these capabilities, developers will refuse to use the enterprise private cloud. This means that IT organizations need to evaluate their private cloud deployment plans to assess whether they meet the developer's requirements.

Forrester analyst James Staten "scoffs" at the deployment of some virtualized IT environments as private clouds. The bottom line is that developers now know what they want and if they do not meet their expectations, they will not be satisfied. According to a Forrester survey, most developers are dissatisfied with the deployment of private clouds. Their attitude can be summarized as: "If this can help my work, I will use it, but if not, I will continue to use the cloud environment I am already using."

If companies force developers to use "official" cloud computing, it is impossible to improve efficiency.

Solutions Choose IaaS, PaaS or other?

One interesting observation in the report is what kind of development framework software engineers are looking for. Infrastructure as a service for virtual machines, storage, and networking not only discourages increased productivity, but also forces developers to manage "pipelines" rather than focus more on application functionality.

The solution to this IaaS environmental issue is platform as a service. The logic is that programming frameworks provide developers with common services, freeing developers from handling the details and relying on the framework to perform the necessary tasks, including persistent data storage and identity management.

The framework works well if all you want is functionality provided by the framework. However, applications often require features that are not provided by the framework and sometimes require direct access to lower-level functionality, and the framework of high productivity becomes a shackle.

Forrester believes that developers need a mix of capabilities, that is, they need services that help them solve tedious tasks while still having access to lower-level capabilities. While Amazon cloud computing services meet their requirements, AWS has a rich set of development services for developers, while providing developers with direct access to lower-level functionality, allowing developers to deploy or install features other than AWS.

The report notes that independent software vendors (ISVs) have also entered the market to build SaaS versions of their infrastructure products. For example, Informatica now offers integrated cloud-based services that allow developers to integrate different applications. As a result, enterprise applications are becoming richer and include the capabilities of self-developed code, cloud services and independent software vendors. Developers are more of an assembly, not an application.

Infrastructure and Operations Five Things You Must Do to Take Control of Cloud Computing

The report conveys an accurate message: infrastructure and operations must respond to the expectations of these developers or they will be eliminated by the times. Now we need to do is to achieve flexibility, not just the management of assets.

Forrester provided five suggestions:

Become a service agency. Infrastructure and operations (I & O) are now under pressure from external service providers who are trying their best to help developers. I & O needs to respond positively. My point is that I & O needs to simplify its approach and avoid the traditional approach to custom service. While providing customized configurations appears to be customer focused, it adds overhead and delays. To become a service organization, I & O needs to provide a rich development environment and a variety of important application services. I & O should also create a pre-approved SaaS vendor's product list to let developers quickly see their products.

Create a service directory. This is very powerful. Instead of forcing developers to deploy their application configuration from scratch, creating a service catalog can provide developers with preconfigured and repaired images for quick access, as well as misconfiguration or neglect of critical patches. Pre-configured image acceleration development, very attractive to developers. This allows I & O to ensure that the application runs in the pre-configured configuration and the latest version, which is more effective than post-development auditing.

Let enterprise architecture design patterns for developers to use. It is recommended that enterprise architectures be used to create application designs and patterns and provide them to development teams. This can bring many benefits, lower operating costs, better skills sharing and more.

Cost transparent. According to the report, pay-per-use models are very appealing, allowing you to ensure that your resources are used efficiently.

Unlike on-premise equipment, which involves initial investment, paying for use involves the entire life cycle of the application. Forrester recommends transparency of all the costs of the application, which allows developers to scale and shrink the application on a case-by-case basis, while operating the department to run the application more efficiently.

Application lifecycle flexibility with DevOps. The developer self-service is very attractive, of course, also provides many advantages, including improving engineering efficiency, make engineers happier. However, failure to achieve flexibility in the application lifecycle means that organizations can not get the full benefit of all the financial and marketing response that cloud computing offers.

Achieving life-cycle flexibility requires the optimization and coordination of all parties. Even if you hate DevOps, you still need it. Now that cloud computing can deliver resources without delay, IT processes also need to eliminate latency, which is where DevOps works only if development and operations collaborate.

The message from this report is that the rapid development of cloud computing is imperative for the reform of the existing processes. We expect the cloud computing development team will not wait too long.