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What is Cloud Transformation? 

Cloud-Native, DevSecOps /

What is Cloud Transformation?  What is cloud transformation? In today’s world, cloud is the first option for everyone to run their workloads, unless they have a compelling reason such as compliance or security concerns to deploy it on-premises. Most of the organisations who manages their workloads on their own data centres, are looking for an opportunity to move to the cloud for numerous benefits which most of the cloud services providers offer. As per the recent survey by Forbes and Gartner recently increased prior forecasts of worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services to anticipate a 23.1% jump this year, followed by a more than 16% increase in 2022 — up from $270 billion in 2020 to just under $400 billion.  While the acceleration of cloud transformations continuous, most businesses data still reside on on-premises. Consequently, hybrid solutions that were once downplayed by virtualisation have emerged as not only practical but likely a preferred approach. We’ve moved past the “cloud-first” era to a time when clouds are becoming omnipresent.   There are numerous benefits in using cloud services. Some of key benefits are discussed below;  Pay per use: Switching from the on-premises IT infrastructure to remote cloud infrastructure provided by a third-party cloud provider allows businesses to make potentially significant cost savings in their IT expenditure.  Disaster Recovery: Cloud computing ensures that disaster recovery is much easier than it might otherwise be. This is because critical data is stored off-site in third-party data centres, thereby making it easier to retrieve in the event of unscheduled downtime.  Scalable: As your business grows, so is your infrastructure needs. Alternatively, it may be that you’ve had to scale down your operation, and with it your IT compute and storage needs. Cloud computing provides easy scalability, allowing you to scale up and scale down as your circumstances change.   Less maintenance: By adopting cloud, businesses can free up the resources (including both financial and human resources) for deployment in other areas. This allows them to have more focus on customer base, rather than managing and maintaining their own IT resources.  Security: Data security has been one of the key aspects to be considered when migrating into cloud. cloud providers go to great lengths to ensure that data is kept secure. They are tasked with protecting data from threats and unauthorized access, and this is something they do very effectively using robust encryption.  Because of these obvious reasons and much more benefits, many businesses are starting their journey to move or transform their applications or workloads to the cloud and this process of migrating or transforming the applications or workload is called as “Cloud Transformation”  What is Cloud Transformation? Cloud transformation is simply the process of migrating or transforming your work to the cloud, including migration of apps, software programs, desktops, data, or an entire infrastructure in alignment with the business objectives of the organization  The first step in performing the transformation is to do a comprehensive assessment if the cloud computing is suitable for our organisation from a long-term business strategy. Cloud transformation is popular because, among many other benefits, it increases the efficiency of sharing and storing data, accelerated time-to-market, enhanced organizational flexibility and scalability, and centralize their network security. Overall, it hugely changes the way of operating a business.  How to Approach Cloud Transformation? As state above cloud transformation is the enablement of a complete business transformation. To achieve this, organizations focus on cloud strategy, migration, management and optimization, data and analytics, and cloud security to become more competitive and resilient.  There are various ways the transformation to the cloud can be done but you may need to choose the option that better suits your organisation and its goals. A few options listed below will help you to consider the right options for the transformation approach.   Understanding the Organisation long term goals and environment   Security and regulatory considerations  Building a cloud transformation strategy and roadmap  Choosing the right cloud and approach   Defining a Robust Governance model  Layers of Cloud transformation  All or any of the below component layers are to be changed as a part of transformation when migrating to the cloud.  Application layer  It is the core layer where your application is hosted to run. It is also known as compute layer to run application code which performs business operations. Along with application code base, it also contains dependencies and software packages which are required to run your application.  Data layer  It consists of data which are processed by the application layer. This is the layer which maintains the state of your application. Storage (Files, Databases, stage management tools) is the key components of this layer.   Network layer  It consists of network components like LAN, router, load balancers, firewalls, and VPN etc. It is responsible for providing the segregation between different components and ensure restriction is applied between them as needed.  Security layer  Though it is mentioned as a separate layer, it will be part of each other layer mentioned above. For e.g., when migrating application layer, we will not be just migrating it but will be considering proper security in place by having security rules (firewall rules) in place and only the required traffic is allowed from and to the application. It applies for data and network layer as well.  Types of Cloud transformation  Distinct types of cloud transformation are listed and discussed below,  Lift & shift (or) Re-hosting  Re-platform  Re-factor (or) Re-architect  Develop in cloud  Lift & Shift (or) Re-hosting  This approach is nothing but lifting the application from on-prem and deployed to the cloud as-is. This is one of the quickest ways to transform the application from on-premises to the cloud but will not utilize the benefits of cloud-native features. The applications which do not have dependencies with on-premises and have less business impact are the ideal candidates for this approach. It is a way to start your cloud journey with smaller applications and then progress to a bigger one.  Application layer – No change  Data layer – No

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VMWare - Tanzu Application Platform

Unlocking The Potential of Tanzu Application Platform

Cloud-Native, DevSecOps, Uncategorised /

Unlocking The Potential of Tanzu Application Platform (TAP – a Multicloud, Portable Kubernetes PaaS) Cloud-native application architecture targets building and running software applications that triumph the flexibility, scalability, and resilience of cloud computing by following the 12 factors, microservices architecture with self-service agile infrastructure offering an API based collaborative and self-healing system. Cloud-native encompasses the various tools and techniques used by software developers today to build applications for the public cloud. Kubernetes is the de-facto standard for container orchestration to build the Cloud Native applications. Undoubtedly Kubernetes is changing the way enterprises manages their infrastructure and application deployments. However, at the core, there is still a clean separation of concerns between the developers and operators. Now comes the new VMWare’s Tanzu Application Platform under the Tanzu Portfolio to address some of the fundamental issues with the developer and operations collaboration issues and provides an effortless path to application deployments in a secure, module, scalable in a portable Kubernetes environment. What is Tanzu Application Platform (TAP)? “A superior multi-cloud developer experience on Kubernetes VMware Tanzu Application Platform is a modular, application-aware platform that provides a rich set of developer tooling and a prepared path to production to build and deploy software quickly and securely on any compliant public cloud or on-premises Kubernetes cluster.” By VMWare Tanzu Application Platform simplifies workflows Tanzu Application Platform simplifies workflows in both the inner loop and outer loop of cloud-native application development and deployments on Kubernetes. A typical inner loop consists of developers writing the code in their local IDE (Integrated development environment), testing, and debugging the application, push and pull the code from a soured code repository, deploying to a development or staging environment, and then making additional code changes based on the continuous feedback. An outer loop consists of the steps to deploy the application to a non-production /production environment and support them over time. In the instance of a cloud-native platform, the outer loop includes activities such as building container images, adding container security, i.e., vulnerability scanning, trust and adding signature and configuring continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipelines. TAP creates an abstraction layer above the underlying Kubernetes, focusing on portability and reproducibility, avoiding lock-in where possible. Underneath, TAP provides strong support with all the tools required for the build and deployment of the applications in the form of Accelerators and Supply chains Choreographers. TAP can be installed and managed on most of the managed Kubernetes instances like AKS(Azure), EKS(AWS) and GKE (Google Cloud) available in the market as well as any other unmanaged conformant Kubernetes cluster. Developers can even install it on their local Minikube instance as well. TAP also supports an out of the box workflow for DevSecOps based on the best open-source tools. However, there is strong support to customise these workflows with the enterprise-grade/commercial tools of choice. TL Consulting TLConsulting brings its consulting and engineering personnel to application modernisation adoption and implementation by providing range of services – as If you need assistance with your Containers/Kubernetes adoption, please contact us at our kubernetes consulting services  page.

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How to Optimise Kubernetes Costs?

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How to Optimise Kubernetes Costs? The increasing popularity of cloud-native applications has brought technologies like microservices and containers to the frontline. Kubernetes is the most preferred container orchestration platform by most enterprises for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containers. Most of the Kubernetes implementations thrive to focus on technical aspects and are least bothered by the costs involved with their benefits. In a recent survey from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), 68% of participants reported that their Kubernetes costs increased in the past year, with bills surging more than 20% year-on-year for most organisations. So, how to optimise Kubernetes costs? How much has your Kubernetes-related spend grown in the last 12 months?   Source:  FinOps Foundation survey When looking at optimising the infrastructure costs, enterprises consider various cost-management best practices, but Kubernetes require a specialised approach. Here we will discuss some of the key aspects to reduce overall Kubernetes costs. Size of the infrastructure as per the need: First and foremost, reducing the consumption costs is to have the correct infrastructure size in terms of pods and nodes. While it is always advisable to overprovision to cater to the unusual spikes, leaving the applications to use unlimited resources can lead to unexpected repercussions. For instance, a stateful database container consumes all the available memory in the node due to an application fault; this leads other pods to wait indefinitely for the resources. This can be prevented by setting up Quotas at Pod and namespace levels. Additionally, it is good to enforce the resource request limits at a container level. Other enforcement is to limit the number of pods running on a node, as running many pods can lead to inefficient resource utilisation. Due to this issue, most cloud providers have set hard limits on their managed instances if Kubernetes. Choosing the right tools: A fundamental way of managing any cloud or infrastructure costs is by monitoring utilisation and costs involved for the resources over a period. It allows users to get better insights into storage, memory, computing, network traffic utilisation, etc, and how the costs associated are distributed between them. Irrespective of managed instances or bare-metal clusters, today, almost all the clusters support one or other tools for monitoring to get the basic information. Suppose we are looking at an enterprise with many clusters. In that case, it is always advisable to have a propriety APIM tooling like Dynatrace, New Relic, App D, Splunk, and Prometheus and so have a proper drill-down of the resources and utilisation. It enables SREs and Kubernetes admins to gain a more comprehensive view of the environment and optimise the costs. Use the monitoring insights to analyse and create actions. And start implementing more concrete actions for better utilisation and cost optimisation.  Adopting the Best Practices Across the Delivery Pipeline: DevOps is a proven practice which helps to reduce the barriers between the Development teams and Operations. It allowed users to create robust and flexible deployments through pipelines. One of the possibility of reducing the time and effort to deploy containers to the Kubernetes cluster is to automate the build and deployment pipelines using CI/CD tooling. Also, practices like GitOps are tailor-made to facilitate continuous delivery when manifests are used and version-controlled in a source code repository, greatly reducing the deployment workloads of the team. An Initial investment will be needed to set up a continuous integration to build, test, and publish containers and continuous delivery to deploy these containers on the cluster. Tools like Harness Argo CD will significantly reduce the manual errors that can cause disruptions in the application, leading to less troubleshooting. This reduced workload will allow teams to focus on more valuable tasks such as functionality development, bug fixes, and improving the security posture of the environment. Conclusion: Kubernetes deployments and operations can be very costly if implemented and managed inefficiently. Most enterprises incorporate Kubernetes without any proper practices, tooling, and personal experience in the organisation. However, without proper guidance, it is often will become unoptimised and businesses don’t think about expenses forefront and will be a heavy operational burden in the long run. Considering the above-mentioned practices could save a lot of unnecessary Kubernetes costs and encourage the implementation of best practices from the beginning. TL Consulting TLConsulting brings its consulting and engineering personnel to application modernisation adoption and implementation by providing range of services – as If you need assistance with your Containers/Kubernetes adoption, please contact us at our kubernetes consulting services  page.

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Application Modernisation with VMWare Tanzu

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APPLICATION MODERNISATION WITH VMWARE TANZU The Need for Accelerating Application Modernisation:  Building innovative, modern apps and modernising existing software are key imperatives for organisations today. Modern apps are essential for deepening user engagement, boosting employee productivity, offering new services, and gaining new data-driven insights. But to maximise the impact of modern apps, organisations need to deliver them rapidly—fast enough to keep up with swiftly changing user expectations and emerging marketplace opportunities. As per the Google’s CIO Guide to App modernisation, in today’s IT landscape, 70-80% of C-Executives report that their IT budgets are spent on managing the legacy applications and infrastructure – In addition to that, legacy systems consume almost 76% of the IT spend. Despite a large amount of investment in legacy applications, most businesses fail to see their digital transformation plans to a satisfactory. On the other hand, constantly changing digital behaviours of consumers and the evolution of viable, reduced Opex, self-sustaining infrastructure models that are better suited to today’s pace of technological change are the primary drivers pushing application modernisation up the CIO/CTO’s list of priorities. According to a study conducted by Google, public cloud adoption alone can reduce the IT overheads by 36-40% when migrating from traditional IT frameworks. However, application modernisation can help in further reduction – it frees up the IT budget to make space for innovation and explore new business value opportunities. Lastly, this digital transformation brings greater agility, flexibility, and transparency while opening operations up to the benefits of modern technologies like AI, DevSecOps, intelligent automation, IoT, etc. Challenges to the Adoption: As per the State of Kubernetes survey 2021, here are the 5 different challenges enterprises face today with the cloud native /Kubernetes adoption, while lack of experience and expertise with the implementation and operations being the top of the list. Containers are very lightweightAs more and more businesses are moving rapidly towards implementing cloud native practices to enable agility and increased time to market, the operational impacts to the business can be vary time to time. While these challenges bring complexity, if would be less complicated and cheaper to address them from the very beginning as part of its cloud strategy. VMware Tanzu portfolio: Due to its lightweight nature, we can create a container image and deploy a container in a matter of seconds. VMWare’s decades of vast experience in virtualisation and the quest of bringing innovation had driven towards introducing the VMWare Tanzu Portfolio. The VMware Tanzu portfolio empowers developers to rapidly build modern apps across a multi-cloud landscape while simplifying operations by using Kubernetes as an underlying platform. VMware Tanzu is an essential component of the growing VMware App Modernisation portfolio, which provides enterprises the required tools and technology, which would help in building new applications and modernising their existing application suits. Using Tanzu portfolio, organisations can rapidly—and continuously—deliver the modern apps that are vital for achieving their strategic goals. Fast-tracking modern apps delivery: Tanzu helps developers deliver modern apps with a quick turnaround and greater reliability. Organisations can use that speed to better address quickly evolving business requirements and changing priorities.  Flexibility With Kubernetes: With Tanzu, Organisations can run Kubernetes in their private clouds, on-premises datacentres in public clouds and at the edge. This flexibility helps organisations align application and cloud decisions better with technical and operational requirements.  Simplified Operations: Deploying and managing the applications across multiple clouds and environments brings new challenges to the operations. Tanzu provides tools to manage, govern and secure all Kubernetes clusters centrally irrespective of where they reside. As a result, operations teams can meet application security and reliability expectations while controlling costs.  Stronger DevOps Collaboration: Tanzu helps alleviate the tension between rapid development goals and stable operations. It transforms the DevOps relationship by giving operations teams what they need to support fast release cycles VMWare Tanzu Value Preposition: The core principles underlying the vision for VMware Tanzu are entirely consistent with VMware’s promise to help customers run any app on any cloud and to drive Kubernetes adoption, to ensure that businesses don’t need to invest in any additional code or training. How Can TLConsulting help organisations with the Modernisation Journey with VM Ware Tanzu? Cloud-native adoption requires a mindset shift, which drives Culture and processes change across the organisation in its IT landscape and technology choices throughout the stack. With the IT being the focus point of the enterprises business strategy. This transformation shift requires the new application to be developed and delivered at a quick turnaround time with greater reliability and quality. Transforming your existing application into a modern app is a complex process with no or minimal guaranteed path for success. A successful transformation requires not only the transformation of your organisation’s technology but also people-centred assets. Culture, process, and leadership need to change to keep up with your new ecosystem. Since Cloud Native is so new, most organisations lack the experience to handle the transformation road on their own. It’s all too easy to get lost. TL Consulting is well-positioned with certified and experienced professionals to help your organisation define and drive your vision with a “Customer First approach” and cloud-native philosophy. We will understand the business objective, long term strategies, and risks involved with a pragmatic assessment matrix and formulate the tailor-made transformation roadmap.We will also assist in the design, architecture, and implementation of the transformation to deliver highly reliable, secure modern apps with a faster time to market. Service Offerings: TLConsulting brings its consulting and engineering personnel to application modernisation adoption and implementation by providing range of services – as below Summary: Adopting and Implementing a Cloud-Native transformation is not an easy feat. Careful thought and planning are required for adopting a Cloud Native strategy and roadmap. For enterprise architects, CTOs and CIOs thinking about transforming their organisation to support the Cloud Native world, some key points should be considered: standardizing their platform and services to support a Cloud Native platform like VMware Tanzu to gain the maximum benefit out of the transformation.While adopting Cloud Native applications can be exciting

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How do Kubernetes and Containers Help Your Enterprise?

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How do Kubernetes and Containers Help Your Enterprise? In today’s world success of any organisation heavily depends on its ability to drive innovation and deliver those at speed. And IT being an enabler for this rapid delivery model, businesses are looking at Kubernetes and containers adoption as an essential piece of technology for building, deploying, and managing their modern applications at scale. Containers provide an abstraction to the underlying applications and drive towards portability, making it possible to run anywhere, across multiple clouds and on-premises data centres. Furthermore, by providing uniform deployment, management, scaling, and availability services for all the applications, irrespective of its technology—Kubernetes offers significant advantages for your IT and development efforts. Kubernetes offers a range of benefits to the various levels of executives and developers; here we will discuss some of those key advantages. Ultimate Need of Containers and Kubernetes: Keeping up with the latest technology trends and organisational goals towards digitalisation is very tough for the IT teams for the last few years. Conventional software models, traditional VM based IT infrastructure will not be able to help in delivering these modern applications at scale. To deliver these new-age applications, one should adopt the new software practices such as agile and DevOps practices alone with cloud-native architecture. Containers and Kubernetes are the 2 key building blocks in the cloud-native architecture, which the organisations widely use to deliver faster, reliable, and efficient software with a significant cost reduction in the application life cycle. Key Advantages: Light Weight: Containers are very lightweight when compared with traditional virtual machines. A Container includes everything it needs to run, including its operation system, dependencies, libraries, and code. Multiple containers can run inside a single node of a cluster; the VM hosts the OS and container runtime, and the team can still take advantage of all the capabilities of traditional infrastructure virtualisation. Speed: Due to its lightweight nature, we can create a container image and deploy a container in a matter of seconds. Once the image is ready, it can quickly replicate containers and easily and quickly deploy as needed. Destroying a container is also a matter of seconds. This also helps with quicker development cycles and operational tasks. Portability: Containers can run anywhere if the container engine supports the underlying operating system—it is possible to run containers on Linux, Windows, MacOS, and many other operating systems. Containers can run in virtual machines, on bare metal servers, locally on a developer’s laptop and all major public clouds. They can easily be moved between on-premises machines and public cloud, and across all these environments, continue to work consistently. As per RedHat’s market dynamics report, please see how organisations benefit from containers and Kubernetes adoption. Kubernetes for ‘everyone’ Kubernetes is well known for supporting the automation of configuring, deploying, and scaling microservice-based applications that are implemented using containers. Also, microservices-based applications orchestrated by Kubernetes are highly automated in their deployment and management, as well as their maintenance, so that it’s possible to create applications that are highly responsive and adaptive to spikes in network traffic and needs for other resources.  It offers significant advantages to all IT executives and developers as below. Biggest Barriers for Kubernetes Adoption: Cost Of Adoption: One of the biggest obstacles to wider Kubernetes (K8s) adoption is deriving the cost of adoption and running the workloads in the Kubernetes clusters. Cost is the key factor for executives to make decisions to leverage the Kubernetes in their enterprise. In a recent FinOps Foundation survey , — 75% of whom reported having Kubernetes in production — highlights Kubernetes cost management difficulties. It revealed that spending on Kubernetes is spiking beyond what deployments should likely require. The survey’s subtitle isn’t exactly subtle: “Insufficient — or non-existent — Kubernetes cost monitoring is causing overspend.” Lack of Skills and Training: Another barrier for adoption is the lack of skilled and experienced personnel on containerisation and orchestration. As a result, although Kubernetes and container adoption is growing rapidly, many organisations still face a steep learning curve to effectively build, deploy, and manage Kubernetes. This is due to both the technology’s immaturity and a lack of operational excellence with it. Organisations are trying various approaches like paired programming, partners, education, and training to overcome this barrier. Visibility and monitoring: Enterprises are deploying Kubernetes clusters spanning across multiple public clouds and /or in their traditional virtualisation data centres or managed services introduce an increasing amount of complexity. To realise the greatest benefits from, organisations need to be able to visualise their entire Kubernetes footprint, including all its workloads (applications, containers, pods, nodes, namespaces, etc.), their dependencies, how they interact with each other in terms of network bandwidths, response times, and memory utilisations for cluster management and optimisation. Security and Compliance: While enterprises give priority to speed in software delivery, security and compliance sometimes are just an afterthought. Security is a major challenge in the container world, just as it has almost everywhere else in IT. Although many changes and innovations so far, security is still not on par with the traditional structure models. Due to the unique nature of Kubernetes and containerized environments, one misconfiguration can be easily multi-folded to many containers. A security breach of a container is almost identical to an operating system-level breach of a virtual machine in terms of potential application and system vulnerability. How to overcome these challenges: Many organizations want to adopt and leverage the benefits of containers but struggle to justify the total time, resources, and cost needed to develop and manage it internally. One approach is to use VMware Tanzu to organize their Kubernetes clusters across all their environments, set policies governing access and usage permissions, and enable their teams to deploy Kubernetes clusters in a self-service manner. This enables infrastructure and operations teams to gain visibility and command of their Kubernetes footprint while still empowering developers to use those resources with a focus on delivering solutions rather than worrying about infrastructure. Bottom Line: Evidently, Kubernetes adoption helps drive innovation and rapid software development with reliability

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Pressure on teams to modernise applications

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Pressure on teams to modernise applications As many organisations are moving towards a cloud-native approach, the need to modernise applications using new platforms and products is inevitable. But are the expectations on teams too much? With agile delivery being the norm, teams are empowered to experiment, align capacity to continuously learn and are encouraged to fail fast. But with that said, there is increasing pressure for teams to cut corners and adapt to tools and engineering standards as they deliver. In TL Consulting’s opinion, this is when most teams fail to adopt Kubernetes and other modern technology correctly. Issues begin to appear right through the build pipeline most commonly with security, multi-cloud integration, compliance, governance, and reliability. Embedding modern engineering standards Organisations often opt for a lift and shift approach to reduce OPEX and or CAPEX. However, the underlying code is not mature enough to be decoupled correctly and housed within a container. This requires considerable rework and creates an anti-pattern for software engineering teams. Instead, to move from the traditional 3-tier architecture and implement new technical stacks, new development principles for cloud applications such as Twelve-Factor Apps need to be embraced. Other levels of DevSecOps automation and infrastructure as code need to become the engineering standard too. The Twelve Factor App The Twelve Factor App is a methodology providing a set of principles for enterprise engineering teams. Like microservices architecture, teams can leverage the similarities of these principles to embed engineering strategies. This does require highly skilled engineers to create models that can be adopted and reused by development teams. Engineering support With these types of expectations put on immature development teams, the pressures and demand on resources impact performance and quality. From our experience we have found that even Big 4 banks require assistance to modernise applications and seek external support from platforms, and products to modernise their app portfolio. e.g., VMWare Tanzu. VMWare Tanzu is an abstraction layer on top of Kubernetes platforms which enables enterprises to streamline operations across different cloud infrastructures.  Tanzu provides ease of management, portability, resilience, and efficient use of cloud resources. It is important to note that to be successful implementing the likes of Tanzu’s suite of products, an organisation would need to establish a DevSecOps culture and mature governance models. Embracing DevSecOps TL Consulting has found many organisations need guidance when embedding a culture shift towards DevSecOps. Teams must have a security first mindset. The norm therefore should not be limited to the likes of security testing, such as Static Application Security Testing (SAST) and Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST), but instead focus on securing applications by design and automating security practices and policies across the SDLC. After all, the goal is to standardise teams’ daily activities, to build secure software into cloud-native engineering workflows. Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) As IT infrastructure has evolved, leveraging IaC can now be invigorating for teams. Engineers can spin up fully provisioned environments that scale, are secure and cost effect. However, if DevSecOps and infrastructure automation orchestration are not aligned, CI/CD pipelines and cloud costs will be difficult to control. To achieve these sustainable processes and practices, implementing a DevSecOps culture that has mature governance models will help keep cloud costs optimised. Conclusion Providing teams with capacity and implementing modern technology platforms will not overcome the engineering challenges faced when modernising applications. To modernise applications requires an established DevSecOps culture, robust governance models and highly skilled teams. Additionally, each team needs to understand the application(s) under their control to determine what needs to be automated. For example: the purpose of the application and customer experience architecture and design of the application and its dependencies application workflows and data privacy policies compliance with government managed data (if applicable) business security policies & procedures cloud security policies & procedures which impact the application application infrastructure employed The modern platforms, products and tools therefore become enablers to optimise cloud-native adoption, not solutions. This is where onsite education, guidance and support from experts and subscriptions models like A Cloud Guru, can be highly beneficial for leaders and engineers. If you are facing challenges implementing DevSecOps or adopting modern technology platforms such as Kubernetes, contact us.

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Road to a Cloud Native Journey

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Road to a Cloud Native Journey Author:  Ravi CheetiralaTechnical Architect ( Cloud & DevSecOps) at TL Consulting “Cloud Native” is the new buzz word in the modern application development. It is an evolving application build pattern. The technology is relatively new to the market; thus, our understanding of the architecture is very primitive and keeps changing over the time with technological advancements in the cloud and containers. Understanding cloud native approach and strategy helps to build better understanding among developers, engineers, and technology leaders so that, teams can collaborate each other more effectively. The Need for Cloud Application Modernization: In today’s IT landscape, 70-80% of C-Executives report that their IT budgets are spent on managing the legacy applications and infrastructure – In addition to that, legacy systems consume almost 76% of the IT spend. Despite of large amount of investment on legacy applications, most businesses fail to see through their digital transformation plans to a satisfactory. On the other hand, constantly changing digital behaviours of consumers and the evolution of viable, reduced opex, self-sustaining infrastructure models that are better suited to today’s pace of technological change are the primary drivers pushing application modernization up the CIO/CTO’s list of priorities. According to a study conducted by Google, public cloud adoption alone can reduce the IT overheads by 36-40% when migrating from traditional IT frameworks. However, application modernization can help in further reduction – it frees up the IT budget to make space for innovation and exploring new opportunities of business value. Lastly, this digital transformation brings greater agility, flexibility, and transparency while opening operations up to the benefits of modern technologies like AI, DevSecOps, intelligent automation, IoT, etc. Kickstart to Cloud Native Journey Beyond the upfront investments after creating a buy-in, application modernization entails several considerations to be made by the CIOs, and more importantly, a game plan to manage the massive amount of change that comes with such a large-scale transformation. However, moving away from the sunk costs of legacy IT can help enterprises take on a new trajectory of profitability and value. Here are four essential steps to a successful application modernization roadmap. Assessment of legacy system landscape: The first and crucial step of the application modernisation journey should be assessment of the legacy system systems. identify the business-critical systems, applications, and business processes. High-value assets that need to be modernized on priority can form the first tier of the legacy application modernization process. Next, we need to start with business value and technical impact assessments. The outcome of these assessments will drive the journey further down to the roadmap. Pickup your Anchor applications: Once an assessment is complete and business services are identified, team must shortlist their modernization options from their legacy application suite. This list will enable a more targeted implementation plan. Following this, an implementation framework needs to be developed and implemented, which will help you to create a modernization schedule. Assessment should also help in determining the scope of the project, team, technologies, and the skills required. Define the success criteria: Various application transformation approaches comprise different costs and risks involved. Say for some instances refactoring a legacy application cost much higher than rebuilding the application using a new technical stack. Most of the times organisations fail to determine the target outcomes in effective manner. So, it is very important to measure the change, costs and risks involved along with the return on investment, the features we aim to improve, and set new benchmarks of attaining agility and resilience while bringing an enhanced security and risk management strategy into the portfolio. Structure of target operating model: The traditional operating structure consists of network engineers, system administrators, and database engineers, are no longer fit to support to the new modern digital transformation landscape, so the organisation must align the IT landscape to suite to new suite, alongside upskilling/reskilling path – In the end, applications are ultimately maintained and supported by the people, and your end state operating model must account for ownership of microservices, who will configure and manage the production environment, etc. Benefits of Cloud Native applications: Drives Innovation: With a new cloud native environment, it is easy drive the digital transformation and  to adopt the new age technologies like AI/ML, automation driven insights as these are readily available in most of the cloud environments and comes with easy integration to the applications. Ship Faster: In current world, key to the success of any business is time to market. With the DevOps and CI/CD capabilities, it is very much a possibility to deploy changes very frequently (multiple times in day) while it takes months to deploy a change in traditional software development. Using DevOps, we can transform the software delivery pipeline using automation, building automation, test automation, or deploy automation. Optimised Costs: Containers manage and secure applications independently of the infrastructure that supports them. Most of the organisations use Kubernetes to manage the large volumes of containers. Kubernetes is an open-source platform that is standard for managing resources in the cloud. Cloud-native applications are using containers; hence it fully benefits from containerization. Alongside Kubernetes, there is a host of powerful cloud-native tools. This, along with an open-source model, drives down costs. Enhanced cloud-native capabilities such as Serverless let you run dynamic workloads and pay-per-use compute time in milliseconds. So, it has standardization of infrastructure and tooling. Hence, it helps to reduce cost. Improved Reliability: Achieving high fault tolerance is hard and expensive with the traditional applications. With modern cloud-native approaches like microservices architecture and Kubernetes in the cloud, you can more easily build applications to be fault tolerant with resiliency and autoscaling and self-healing built in. Because of this design, even when failures happen you can easily isolate the impact of the failure, so it doesn’t take down the entire application. Instead of servers and monolithic applications, cloud-native microservices helps you achieve higher uptime and thus further improve the user experience. Foundational elements of Cloud Native applications: In general, cloud native applications are designed

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Reasons to Move, and Reasons Not to Move, to the Public Cloud

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Reasons to Move, and Reasons Not to Move, to the Public Cloud Public cloud adoption is more popular now than ever. Companies across all industries are modernizing their environments to support remote work, lower costs, and improve reliability. In fact, Gartner predicts global public cloud end-user spending to increase by 23% in 2021. Despite this momentum, it’s important to realize the public cloud isn’t an ideal fit for every organization. Many companies rushed into the cloud during the pandemic without fully understanding the implications. Now, issues are surfacing — and some businesses are reconsidering their migration altogether. This post explores the pros and cons of moving to the public cloud. Keep reading to learn more about whether the cloud makes sense for your business, and the reasons to move, and reasons not to move, to the public cloud. What Is the Public Cloud? The public cloud is a framework that lets you access on-demand computing services and infrastructure through a third-party provider. In a public cloud environment, you’ll share the same hardware, software, and network services as other companies or tenants. It’s different from a private cloud environment where your company receives access to private, hosted infrastructure and services. To illustrate, it’s like staying in a hotel versus renting a private cottage on Airbnb. A few of the top public cloud providers on the market include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud, and IBM Cloud. Public cloud services can refer to infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS), and platform as a service (PaaS) models. Top Reasons for Public Cloud Adoption Companies have a variety of reasons for migrating to the public cloud. Here’s a few of them. Replacing the Data Center and Lowering Computing Costs Enterprises are increasingly moving away from data centers. In fact, by 2025, 80% of enterprises will shut down their traditional data centers. Companies with aging data centers can avoid retrofitting facilities or building new ones by migrating to the public cloud and leveraging hosted infrastructure instead. This greatly reduces costly builds and minimizes operational expenses. Achieving Rapid Scalability The public cloud enables rapid scalability. You can significantly increase storage and compute power through the public cloud at a fraction of the cost of expanding your existing infrastructure. The public cloud is particularly useful for growing startups that need to be able to accommodate massive usage increases. It’s also ideal for organizations that experience seasonal spikes in sales. For example, an e-commerce provider might use the public cloud when ramping up production and sales around the holidays. By the same token, the public cloud provides flexibility to easily scale back down during lulls. Accessing Managed Services The service provider manages the underlying hardware and software in a public cloud deployment. They also typically provide security, monitoring, maintenance, and upgrades. This approach enables you to take a hands-off approach to managing infrastructure. Your IT team can focus on other business needs, with the expectation that the public cloud provider will keep your services up and running within the scope of the service-level agreement (SLA). Reducing IT Burden Right now, there’s a widespread IT staffing shortage. The issue is particularly bad in the data center industry, where 50% of data center owners and operators are having difficulty finding qualified candidates for open jobs. If your company’s having a hard time finding qualified IT workers, you may want to consider outsourcing operations to the public cloud. This can free your IT workers from grunt work and enable them to take on more valuable projects. At the same time, your IT team can still manage its public cloud environment. For example, they can still perform data governance and identity and access management (IAM). They just won’t have to worry about maintaining or upgrading any hardware or software.  Strengthening Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) Another reason why companies migrate to the cloud is to improve their BC/DR posture. Business continuity involves establishing a plan to deal with unexpected challenges like service outages. Disaster recovery is all about restoring network access following an issue like a cyberattack or natural disaster. Companies often rely on the public cloud to establish BC and DR across two or more geographically separate locations. Running a BC/DR strategy through the cloud is much more efficient, as it prevents you from having to maintain a fully functioning recovery site 24/7. This approach drastically reduces costs. At the same time, using the public cloud can guarantee full operational BC/DR availability. This can provide the peace of mind that comes with knowing you can keep your business running when emergency strikes. Why Companies Avoid the Public Cloud Without a doubt, the public cloud offers several exciting advantages for businesses. But there are also a few major drawbacks to consider. Here are some of the top reasons why companies might avoid the public cloud. Higher Costs Companies often expect instant cost savings when migrating to the cloud. In reality, cloud services can sometimes be more expensive than on-premises data centers — at least at first. Oftentimes, companies fail to achieve true cost savings until they learn how to take full advantage of the public cloud. This can take months or years. It’s important to carefully break down cloud migration costs and ROI before moving to the public cloud to get an accurate understanding of the move’s short-, medium-, and long-term financial impact. In some cases, companies find they fare better with their existing setups. Data Ownership Concerns Right now, there’s an ongoing debate about who owns data in the public cloud. Some cloud providers attempt to retain ownership of some or all of the data they store. As such, many business leaders fear storing data in the public cloud, and some simply can’t risk it. Instead, they choose to avoid the issue by using their own dedicated infrastructure. It’s a good idea to talk with your team before migrating to the public cloud and conduct a security and privacy

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The need for adoption

DevSecOps /

Embrace DevSecOps Author:  Ravi CheetiralaTechnical Architect ( Cloud & DevSecOps) at TL Consulting DevOps is a widely adopted cultural norm in modern software development. It enabled enterprises to bring development teams, operations teams and tools under a single streamlined process. In addition, its automation capabilities help organisations to deliver the software much faster, by reducing the costs and release cycle times. However, in many cases security is not prioritised as a part of the CI/CD practices, thus the move to DevSecOps has not been adopted. While DevOps has been a successful methodology, one of the key roadblocks is that it doesn’t stress much upon a security and governance lens, as its core focus is on agility and faster time to market. A recent survey conducted by GitLab, (one of the popular DevOps vendors) had proven the point that more than 70% organisations have not included security in their DevOps model. With the rise of cyber-attacks, most of the incidents occur by exploiting the vulnerabilities in the software, which indicates a compelling need of rearchitecting the existing DevOps model to DevSecOps by adding additional levels of security and governance. Market Insights on DevSecOps adoption As per the recent survey by Gitlab conducted in the fall of year 2021. Please find some of the insights on DevOps, and security. The chart below illustrates the various drivers to adopt the DevSecOps. These findings demonstrate the alignment of improved security as a top priority for DevSecOps enablement. Why do we need DevSecOps? As per the above market insights, it is evident that more than 50% of the organisations have chosen security as their primary driver to lead to adoption. This is due to the fact conventional security measures are not good enough to cope up with latest technology innovations. Hence there is pressing need of DevSecOps adoption to have high security measures. What is DevSecOps? DevSecOps is an extension of DevOps by adding additional measures on security and governance layers, such as security testing, observability and, governance. Just like DevOps, the goal of DevSecOps is to deliver the trusted and secured software faster. Security adoption barriers in DevOps: Developers are focused on acceleration, least bothered about security – With the DevOps adoption, developers deliver the software faster. However, they tend to ignore the best security practices. Some of the risks include using an unsolicited third-party /open-source software downloaded from the internet without much of scrutiny and consent. Conflicting interests between teams – Development teams are usually relying on other teams for security and vulnerability testing, which is usually planned as a separate phase of the project. The delivered software might pose multiple security threats, vulnerabilities and usually, security analysts are assigned to review and take care of these issues. These usually create a knowledge gap between teams, thus end up delivering a compromised software. Cloud and container security challenges – Undoubtedly the wide adoption of containers and public cloud environments are helping in exceptional productivity with low cost and innovation lens for the organisation, however it also brings new security risks and challenges.  For instance, containers are an operating system agnostic and  that can run applications anywhere, but the lack of visibility into containers makes it difficult to scan them for vulnerabilities. Lack of skills and knowledge on security – There are fundamental knowledge gaps on security frameworks as most of the security standards are industry specific. Which acts as a barrier to achieve higher degree of efficiency with devops. The pitfall of DevOps nature – The core nature of DevOps is collaboration of the teams. This interconnection allows us the sharing of privileged information. Teams share account credentials, tokens, and SSH keys. Systems such as applications, containers, and microservices also share passwords and tokens. This opens an opportunity to attackers to disrupt operations, and steal information.          How to implement DevSecOps? Embed Security in the pipelines – Implement security in the DevOps or CI/CD pipelines as an additional level of integration, such as including the DAST, SAST and vulnerability, image scanning tools, which would help to identify and resolve the code vulnerabilities as soon as they appear. Identify the compliance requirements at design stage – Understand the organisation security framework and compare with the industry’s security guidelines during the early stages of design. This gap analysis will help us to assess the right tools to choose for automation. Shift left security approach – Embedding the security in the early stages of development cycles. As we move along to various phases of the development process, security will be carried along instead of focusing on the end. This leads to a better outcome and lesser challenges. Shift left is a preventive approach rather a reactive one. Automate as much as possible – The cornerstone of the DevOps is automation, use those capabilities to automate the security and governance by integrating with right tools in the CI/CD pipelines. DevSecOps tooling needs to run with full automation without any manual interventions. Validating cloud /container security standards – As a best practice, it is good to evaluate the cloud security standards with organisational, industry security frameworks and identify the gaps in the early stages. This will ensure the early detection of threats and organisational alignment. Creating awareness and education – Clear delineation of roles and responsibilities, creating the awareness of security best practices, providing education on industry security framework. Establishing a safe code guideline from the security lens. Adopting a security tooling is not always the best solution, as it might be ineffective if the teams do not know on how to use it. Establishing a governance model – Creating a governance model is the vital part of implementing the devsecops model to get the maximum outcome. Adopt the observability and governance tools, which will help to create a transparency in the teams to identify and address the security and other application related issues reported at all levels. How does DevSecOps fit in organisational GRC framework? GRC (Governance, Risk management and Compliance) and DevSecOps use various skills, tools and processes.

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