BrainBlog for Morpheus Data by Jason Bloomberg
The common theme across the first generation of cloud management platforms (CMPs) was command and control. The cloud operations (CloudOps) team used CMPs to keep the lights on while sticking to the budget, turning various knobs as needed to ensure their organization’s cloud infrastructure kept humming along.
What’s good for CloudOps, however, isn’t necessarily best for developers. The old days when dev would throw code over the wall to ops are long gone. Today, developers require tooling that enables them to work hand-in-hand with ops as they develop and deploy the software so essential to the business.
First-generation CMPs, however, fall short. Such platforms provide a central control point and source of truth for CloudOps but lack the features that support the developer experience necessary for modern software. Additionally, the increasingly heterogeneous nature of IT has meant hypervisor or cloud-specific tools have driven the need for a more agnostic approach than these early CMPs provided.
FROM COMMAND AND CONTROL TO CACOPHONY AND CHAOS
The opposite extreme from CMP’s ops-focused command and control are the loose assemblages of development and CI/CD tools we call the DevOps toolchain.
DevOps toolchains vary from one development shop to another, and often within large shops as well from project to project. Take some Git-based tool, add one or more infrastructure-as-code products, mix in some value stream management, and top it off with deployment tools. Voila! You have a DevOps toolchain.
These toolchains have one primary benefit: flexibility. Members of the development team can pick and choose the tools they want to use, ideally empowering them to achieve greater levels of productivity and job satisfaction.
However, such flexibility comes at a cost. Toolchains can be brittle, expensive to maintain, and lack the governance policy that enterprises demand.
Organizations thus face a dilemma. Legacy CMPs offer command and control without developer flexibility, while DevOps toolchains bring flexibility to the table at the expense of increased complexity and risk. The solution is somewhere in the middle: platform engineering.
Read the entire BrainBlog here.
