In today’s digital era, technology moves fast and consumer behaviour changes quickly in response. Organisations hoping to thrive need to adapt as quickly, and implement digital technologies that service CX and other business strategies as soon as possible. Hand in hand with this comes accelerated application deployment, and the speed is only going to increase.
However, rapid implementation is not without its challenges and pitfalls, says Richard Vester, Group Executive of Cloud Services at EOH. “These include not understanding the full scale of the challenge and issues at hand, unforeseen technical difficulties, inaccurate financial forecasting and planning, and finally making costly mistakes that damage reputation or lose customers.”
These challenges are driving a need for solutions that will enable organisations to troubleshoot digital implementations without running any of these risks. “Essentially a new approach to rapid application deployment and development.”
This is where DevOps comes in, he explains. “DevOps is not only a highly sophisticated version of a staging environment, it also comprises development, testing and operations, based on the principles of continuous integration and delivery, and billed by the hour. Enabling this requires a highly flexible, cost-effective and agile environment devoted to quick deployment while allowing for constant change.”
With this in mind, he says EOH Cloud DevOps provides exactly this environment, bringing a transformation that can embrace rapid, frequent and consistently reliable roll-out of digital technology.
EOH Cloud DevOps is a test and development platform that can be used by businesses of all types and sizes – for those running a single server or a complex multi-tier ecosystem. “The cloud offers the ultimate environment for successful, cost-effective application testing and deployment. It combines the power of several highly effective existing cloud-based technologies that EOH provides, including Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Cloud Backup and Cloud Manager. Because it is billed by the hour, this is the perfect solution for projects,” Vester says.
He adds that there is growing demand for cloud-based testing environments that combine with continuous integration. “This is being driven by several factors. Firstly, the cost of the necessary computing resources is significantly reduced by a cloud delivery model. Secondly, execution time is lowered due to the flexibility, quick availability and unlimited storage of the cloud. Thirdly, it provides the ability to run automated tests on different machines in different environments without having to build the actual testing infrastructure.”
Next, he says, is the excellent scalability it offers, which provides exactly the right resources at the right time, for optimal cost-efficiency and full control over the test environment and the platforms that comprise it.
“EOH Cloud DevOps allows organisations to spin up as many virtual machines as they need to replicate real-world usage scenarios and traffic. Hardware, network bandwidth and workloads can be simulated in ways that exactly match real-world conditions. Moreover, production-scale testing ensures that stress points are exposed and fixed before real-world deployment, resulting in higher quality, more reliable offerings to the market.”
In addition, EOH Cloud DevOps gives businesses an easily scalable, on-demand service that they fully control. “As with all cloud-based services, EOH Cloud DevOps solves the problem of hardware provisioning to support development and testing. Replicating the anticipated customer experience can be prohibitively expensive if undertaken in-house. This stumbling block completely disappears using cloud-delivered infrastructure. PaaS allows customers to recreate the exact environment to match the real-world customer experience.”
Organisations can expand or shrink the environment at will, with the ability to spin up as many virtual machines as they need in a matter of minutes rather than days. This instant provisioning and flexibility allows businesses to precisely match their DevOps infrastructure to their business needs at any given time. This gives the double benefit of ensuring that they always have enough resources available, and that they don’t waste any resource investment by having parts of their infrastructure lying dormant.
Vester says DevOps has completely replaced previous lengthy development, testing and release cycles. It enables a continuous flow of updates that has transformed the iterative approach to development. “A production-like environment can be created, in which testing is done in small increments, with code updating at frequent short intervals. This improves early problem detection.”
Ultimately, he says EOH DevOps allows organisations to harness the full power of the cloud, to ensure their applications and systems run flawlessly prior to deployment. “Development and deployment times are cut, and businesses can respond quickly to customer demands and digital transformation.”
