A purpose built DevOps system that leverages unique capabilities of public cloud can help you dramatically improve software development efficiency and transform DevOps from being a task-driven cost-center to a partner with the business in driving new revenue.
How do you do this? In short:
- Enable self-service to increase software development velocity
- Use unique public cloud capabilities and APIs to dramatically improve infrastructure utilization and cost structures
- Run DevOps with metrics that reflect shared business objectives
- Use spending as metric for DevOps system for governance and audit controls
DevOps teams typically 10-20% of a development organization
It’s not uncommon to see large DevOps teams (up to 20%) maintaining tools, integrations, and debugging infrastructure and environments. Skilled DevOps engineers are now some of the hardest engineers to recruit and retain. We’ve heard more than once of a newly hired DevOps developer being poached before the ink is dry on their employment agreement!
It usually takes 6-9 months to build a reasonable DevOps system integrating 20 (or even up to 40!) different tools and technologies with custom scripts. Once built, 30% of the schedule is blocked off for an environment and toolset maintenance and upgrades as tools and organizational needs evolve.
An integrated DevOps system that integrates tools and infrastructure to provide a consistent experience to development and operations teams can reduce overhead by up to 50%.
Public cloud APIs offer unique capabilities that can reduce costs by up to 80%
Public cloud offers dozens of different services, each with new capabilities and deployment model options. For example, you can buy compute instances on the spot market at anywhere from a 50-90% savings over on-demand instance costs. But the tools must be able to leverage these new models reliably.
True story: In our own experience building the Applatix DevOps automation software (using Applatix), we saved 50% by using our own software to deploy development on AWS spot instances, and then another 30% savings by using our own software to cycle off test fixtures (to run automated test cases, at scale) when unused.
The point is: public cloud services like AWS offers many opportunities to dramatically improve infrastructure utilization and cost structure if your DevOps processes and tools are built to actively manage these new capabilities.
Leverage containers to dramatically increase efficiency and reduce costs
Containers enable you to run multiple workloads on a single instance. Hyper-scale providers such as Google and Facebook have used containers for more than a decade to achieve up to 80% utilization of resources, as compared to 25-40% for the typical enterprise data center.
However, container and container orchestration technology are moving very quickly. A fully packaged, reliable, and scalable DevOps system that leverages containers can dramatically increase utilization and reduce costs.
Summary
At Applatix, we believe the public cloud enables you to achieve levels of shipping agility and cloud utilization only previously available to the most successful web companies.
DevOps is the key to this kind of success in the public cloud. But your DevOps system must be designed from the ground up for the unique capabilities of the public cloud. You can dramatically improve your cost structure and shipping cycles by leveraging the unique capabilities of the public cloud in conjunction with containers and microservices.
Applatix offers an end-to-end DevOps automation system for the public cloud that shrink-wraps over 40 tools and infrastructure automation APIs into a set of microservices. Applatix enables developer self-service with guardrails for enterprise governance, audit, and budgetary control. Applatix transforms DevOps from a task-driven cost-center that is measured by trouble ticket completion times – into a set of developer services that are the key to enabling the business to execute on digital strategies to adapt to a software-driven world.
Contact us for a complete overview and demonstration of Applatix.
