Revolutionary organisations are embracing a cloud-first model, leveraging the cloud to drastically modernise and directly provide innovative and improved services and functions to the consumers. But to start out with the cloud first model and making a shift to adopt the cloud first approach are two completely different courses. The way organisations choose to overcome the exclusive concerns associated with the cloud operations – CloudOps and administration could mark the difference between falling behind and getting ahead in the competition. 

Here is how CloudOps empowers unified Cloud operations for improved business productivities

What is CloudOps?

Cloud operations – CloudOps is the reinforcement of the best practices and procedures, which empowers platforms based on cloud, applications, and data that is stored in the cloud to perform effectively over a prolonged time period. This has been a significant idea as successful cloud computing is not based on the capability to transfer assignments to the cloud but based on the capability to resolve a practical business issue with the passage of time.  

Although most of the functions of the cloud platform are not something new, this augmentation of the cloud brings along a large number of its extra innovative characteristics to the platform based on the public cloud. This means that those charged with operations or CloudOps are required to determine the correct operational practices and procedures around the capabilities of the cloud instead of altering the conventional tactics for cloud operations. 

In other words, at a time when switching to the cloud right now has become an imperative idea, the capability to stay there and remain effective is mainly dependent on the operational practices and procedures and their excellence.  

Uninterrupted Operations

CloudOps also depends on uninterrupted operations. It is an approach to operations, which is evolving from the best practices around DevOps. Uninterrupted operations own the capability to run a system based on a cloud in such a manner that there is no further requirement of taking an application out of service, either partially or fully, in order to support the accomplishment of the objective of absolutely no interruption.

In order to accomplish this goal, there is a need to update and set up the software into production without causing any disturbance to the service. Therefore, uninterrupted operations as associated with the CloudOps actually translate into setting up a mechanism that supports the occurrence of absolutely no interruption. 

Uninterrupted operations are all about never halting the processes. Therefore, it is about no interruption and total automation of most of the aspects of the operations. This makes redundancy the best exercise at the cloud provider layer that offers a specific volume of resiliency as well as at the application layer that is controlled by cloud consumer and not the cloud provider. 

In addition to that, uninterrupted operations are the automation of failover, provisioning, backup, recovery, etc., in order to make sure that the applications never cease to deliver services and the end user never experience service outages. 

How Does Cloud Makes Operations Different?

Redundancy appears to be essential to all effective cloud operations. Previously, when the utilization of redundant structures was expensive, many of those charged with operating systems used to make use of a single server. At the time of server up gradation with fixes and new patches, operations need to be stopped. Improving the utilization of the cloud is a matter of setting forth the prospects of absolutely no interruption, which has never been established. If the cloud is going to resolve this issue, there is a need to obtain complete operational benefit and similarly the requirement for new ideas such as CloudOps to establish that foundation. 

Referring to the CloudOps as the popular best practice and discipline would not be appropriate as it is still in the developing phase. However, it is imperative to get better at CloudOps if an application based on a cloud platform is required to deliver the assured business value. The worst step one can take in this regard is to force the existing on-premises operations model against the cloud operations. CloudOps is about adjusting the operations to cloud computing along with altering the tools and talent as well as expectations during the process.