Hybrid and Multicloud Management

Strategy 2: Streamline the Application Life Cycle

As cloud operations mature, there is a natural progression from infrastructure services to application services. Once you’ve unified your infrastructure control plane, the next step is to do something similar for applications.

This section explores the growing challenges around application deployment and management, suggests a strategy for automating the application life cycle, and looks at possible solutions to implement that strategy.

The Cloud Amplifies Application Challenges

Private and public clouds, digital transformation, and the need to increase the pace of innovation have all conspired to increase the pressure on IT organizations to deliver applications and services more quickly, creating new challenges for already stretched teams, as illustrated in Figure 2-1.

Figure 2-1. Enterprise demands for applications and services are increasing, adding stress on overloaded IT teams. Traditional approaches result in a delayed response to users and dissatisfaction.

Increasing Demands

Enterprise cloud users expect to access infrastructure and other services quickly if not on demand. For example, development teams need access to workspaces, testing systems, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, and other resources without delay to ensure that their work is unimpeded. If your hybrid cloud can’t deliver the ...