By Jason Bloomberg
The automation story behind DevOps centers on CI/CD, the continuous integration and continuous deployment that results in working code ready for production.
Deployment isn’t the end of the process, however. Releasing code is the missing step — putting new software in front of customers and end-users while ensuring it meets the ongoing objectives of the business.
Achieving this customer centricity and rapid deployments of CI/CD is difficult enough with traditional on-premises and cloud environments. But when deploying to Kubernetes-powered cloud-native environments, the massive scale and ephemerality of the operational environment requires an end-to-end rethink of how to release software into production and operate it once it’s there.
The unprecedented demand for cloud-native computing
While most enterprises are currently in the midst of ramping up their Kubernetes deployments, certain industries – telecommunications in particular – are already looking ahead to the need for unprecedented scale.
As part of the 5G buildout, telcos are standing up small data centers at cell towers and points of presence. But “small” is a misleading adjective, since these data centers are essentially clouds in their own right, running potentially hundreds of thousands or even millions of Kubernetes clusters each.
From the perspective of the telco business, product managers want the ability to roll out new services to customers in sophisticated, dynamic ways. They may want to roll out new capabilities to a small group of customers, and then expand the deployment over time. They may have geographically specific offerings. Or perhaps they will delineate different service categories by compliance restrictions.
Furthermore, the telcos represent the tip of the sword. Many industries, from banking to automotive to media, are also looking to leverage similar capabilities to drive market share and customer value.
The list of possible variations in service offerings that such enterprises might want to roll out to different segments of their respective customer bases is extensive. Similarly, the scale that their technical infrastructures, as well as the personnel supporting them, also goes well beyond their earlier requirements from a mere handful of years previous.
On the one hand, this explosive growth in business demand for ephemerality and scale is driving the exceptionally rapid maturation of the Kubernetes ecosystem.
On the other hand, all this cutting-edge technology actually has to work. And that’s where cloud-native operations fits in.
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