What makes a successful cloud project? 

Is it a new and advanced architecture, superb orchestration engine, cloud portal or is it a the that manages all cloud elements? All the factors mentioned above are incredibly important but the thing that makes a cloud successful is the ability to provide valuable services quickly and manage them

How to catch up consumer’s needs.

In today’s world, developers of the fastest and most agile platform that will enable them to write test and push code as easy and quickly as possible. Enterprise developers are some of the most frequent users of today’s enterprise cloud implementations. Cloud Administrators chose developers as the first citizens of the cloud, because they are eager to be fast and agile, but here’s the dilemma: Can IT deliver services as quick and agile as the developers want them?

Implementing DevOps Culture within the IT Department

It seems that for the IT department to be as fast and agile as development, they need to acquire the same development methodologies and culture. In other words: they need to adopt a method of rapid Build, Test, and Deploy for cloud services. To achieve this, we first need some functionality from our cloud solution:

• Easy to build blueprints that represent all cloud elements including computing, network, storage, and orchestration.
• The ability to manage blueprint as a code.
• A framework to manage blueprints development lifecycle (Dev, Test, QA, Prod).

VMware vRealize Automation 7™ converged blueprints present a new and unified model for automation.
While vRealize Automation 7™ already has specialized models for infrastructure, middleware, applications and anything-as-a-service, the converged blueprints are used as a component catalog of reusable building blocks for building and updating services.
vRealize Automation 7™ expresses blueprints declaratively (in YAML) adds the ability to write actions in code (i.e. scripts) or provide a graphical canvas as an alternate blueprint creation mechanism for power users

See here for an example of how to use blueprint code in vRealize Automation 7™: https://youtu.be/L3cqDiNxoVQ

Let’s create the Service Factory.

To make IT as agile as it’s developers it needs to build, test and deploy cloud services faster and reliably. IT needs to introduce new services and update existing services with new features and functionality to make its developers’ operation optimized, fast and smooth. IT Should use a 360° service definition approach that not only includes development stakeholders directly in the definition of the service to identify the features and functionality they need but other IT stakeholders as well to address, for example, security, support, pricing, and operations. Doing so allows functions such as service operations to connect with service development, meaning that we deploy capabilities to monitor and manage provisioning, availability, performance, and capacity with each service.

vRealize™ Code Stream™ Management Pack for IT DevOps The stored and versioned content can be grouped and pushed to multiple environments in one request. This functionality gives IT us the ability to implement a framework to dev, test and release services quickly and easily. IT can use a source control repository with versioning such as Git or TFS to manage our blueprint changes, then use Jenkins to create an end to end tests of our blueprints before they are released and trigger test results to decide if the service is in a release state or whether it needs improvements.

Building a framework to develop services is not enough, there is a need to declare some roles that will manage the development process. Here are some examples of roles, responsibilities, and functions:

• Service Backlog Manager: maintain a prioritized list of service backlog items, the service backlog is prioritized by the service owner and include functional, non-functional and technical team generated requirements.
• Service Owner: responsible for maximizing the value of a service and for managing the service backlog (i.e., determine what do we need to do).
• Service Release and Deployment Manager: plans, schedule and controls the build, test, and deployment of service releases and delivering new functionality while protecting the integrity existing services.
• Scrum Team: A self-organizing cross-functional team optimally compromised of seven ± two people that use the *Scrum framework to deliver services interactively and incrementally maximizing opportunities for feedback, the scrum team consist of a product owner, the development team and a scrum master.
• Scrum Master: An individual who provides process leadership for *Scrum (i.e., ensures Scrum practices are understood and followed) and who support the Scrum team by removing impediments.

There is more functionality in a cloud management platform such as Service Design, Service Catalog Management, Service Improvement Plan, and Service Knowledge Management Systems. These practices together with the mentioned tools and services will give a Cloud IT organization the ability to evolve into the “Ops” part of an organizational DevOps culture and to build a real Fast and Agile “Cloud Service Factory” that will utilize the most out of the SDDC Cloud Infrastructure.

Aviv Waiss is a Professional Consultant in Virtualization Cloud Native App and Cloud Management. Covering the  MEDI region as a Principal systems engineer for the last eight years in VMware, Aviv leads Technology and Business opportunities with hands-on experience in many aspects such as sales, system engineering marketing, and partnership. Having Deep
customer relationships and management skills for more the 15 years Aviv Architect Global consolidation and cloud projects.