Operate with Care: The Cloud is like a Bugatti
The power of public clouds like AWS, Azure, and Google to deliver Infrastructure and Platforms as-a-Service has been well documented, discussed, and analyzed. In the right situation, the potential cost benefits are undeniable. Speed-to-provision, elasticity, and on-demand options are just a few of the significant benefits that public cloud brings us. But just like a Bugatti, public cloud must be handled with the utmost care and preparation.
Bugattis can reach speeds of up to 270 mph – the record for a production car. Would you ever consider even starting the engine of a Bugatti with no brakes or steering? No.
The equivalent in IT is controls and management. Think about it. You would never dream of hitting the accelerator on the Bugatti before you knew you could steer it and stop it – and those are just the basics. What about all the information that we rely upon every day when we are driving, such as fuel, temperature, RPM, and battery life? Without these controls in place and the orchestration to manage and deliver critical information in a form you can understand and base decisions on, most of us would never drive further than five miles from home. Yet every day, companies, driven by a desire for perceived cost savings, speed, agility, and the independence of running a data center or colocation, throw caution to the wind and sprint with reckless abandon towards public cloud.
We read every day about the progress public cloud has enabled and unleashed in the world of genomics, analytics, IoT, business intelligence, and artificial intelligence, but not so much about bitcoin miners stealing compute right from under us. We don’t often hear about the catastrophic event that could not be recovered from because, “We thought the cloud had built-in disaster recovery.” We don’t hear about the analytics group that knows little about security and governance and puts protected information in the cloud for all to see – and steal.
When it comes to public cloud, we must acknowledge that we are talking about driving a racecar without breaks. It is our job as IT leaders to supply a vehicle that can deliver the promise without compromising the governance, policies, continuity, and cost management the business expects of us. We do not have to sacrifice speed, flexibility, or agility to achieve the governance and management the enterprise requires.
What we need is a true Cloud Orchestration Platform and Strategy. And if you’re like me, I don’t want it just for one racecar – AWS for instance. I want it to cover all of them, without having to worry about my exposure and without having to go through an exhaustive process each time I want to take advantage of the great features each cloud offers me. I want the ability to leverage better pricing from one cloud to the next. I want to know I have the management and controls in place for me and my DevOps organization to go where we want, when we want, and without anything slowing us down.
In a sprint to the finish line, enterprises today are only scratching the surface of the slew of capabilities that the public cloud offers. For instance with tooling services you can better utilize the latest advances in cloud technology such as automation pipelines, transforming code into infrastructure, enhanced security, and functional and integration testing covered as part of the automated process.
Each company has its own approach. The Burwood Group approach is what we call the Burwood Cloud Orchestration Platform, which is a platform that provides full enterprise-class multi-cloud management with the flexibility to include additional tools from across the development, provisioning, and governance spectrum. Every organization needs the ability to deliver its development teams with speed, elasticity, and one-touch provisioning, while maintaining operational controls and governance.
In addition to helping you support the tools your team is already using, our capabilities include Infrastructure as Code, cost optimization, automated provisioning pipeline with integrated security analysis, container provisioning and management, integrated monitoring and alerting, cloud migration, and more.
Remember, steering, breaks, and complete knowledge of how your high-performance machine is operating should not be an option or afterthought. It must be a fundamental requirement before anyone gets in the driver’s seat.