Ubiquitous connectivity. Global interconnection with collaboration over a thoroughly meshed network.

It is taken for granted yet entirely necessary, as we live in an interconnected world enabled by Cloud technology, which has been around for a number of years.

The market has been moving from cloud-based development towards cloud-native applications that offers agility, scalability, flexibility. Cloud -powered digital transformations have been a key agenda for Chief Information Officers (CIOs) to be efficient, reduce time to market and offer better experiences to customers.

We look at how to achieve continuous uptime for SAP solutions

Differentiating in a Hyperconnected Economy

If we look back to a decade ago – we saw enterprises around the globe moving their on-premise data centres rapidly into new public cloud providers to help reduce cost and modernize their infrastructure strategy. This shift created a new ecosystem for thousands of new cloud-native solutions to be developed and help technical teams build better applications as the new hyperconnected economy grows.

These solutions are designed, built and optimized for the cloud.

With this in mind there are three key areas for enterprise organizations to work on in a cloud-native strategy:

Design

Ask yourselves these questions, when it comes to design:

  • How can your organization allow for speed and agility in a world where change is constant and permanent?
  • Are you moving from monolith stacks to microservices and serverless driven architecture?

Development style

When moving into development, companies need to assess the situation wisely. So ask yourself these questions first.

  • What is your customer feedback relay – Is continuous feedback valuable? 
  • Do you need a new way of working between developers and IT Operations team?
  • Can you gain a competitive advantage with rapid updates and releases?
  • Is your organization open to a cloud-native approach to software developed and ready to introduce organizational changes like CI/CD and DevOps practices?

Infrastructure

Cloud means automation, scalability, portability and predictability of infrastructure deployment.

Decoupling infrastructure dependencies from the application and implement full automation of deployment means huge productivity savings for cloud-native IT teams.

This is where containers and infrastructure as code are essential. Any change in the design, development style or infrastructure automation has a positive impact on each other. Quite often, companies have various projects addressing these changes simultaneously. Even with their complexity, containers are growing in popularity.

What are Containers?

Containers provide a consistent way to package application components and their dependencies into a single object that can run in any environment. By packaging code and its dependencies into containers, a development team can use standardized units of code as consistent building blocks. The container runs the same way in any environment and allows applications to scale to any size. In fact, development teams are using containers to package entire applications and move them to the cloud without the need to make any code changes. Additionally, containers make it easier to build workflows for applications that run between on-premises and cloud environments, enabling the smooth operation of almost any hybrid environment.

The dangers of too many good things

As more containers are deployed throughout organizations and in the cloud, operations teams need a way to keep track of them. Otherwise, it quickly becomes too much of a good thing becoming a bad, or at least an unmanageable, situation. That’s where orchestration comes into play.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes makes it easier to manage software complexity. As enterprise applications become more complex, development and IT operations teams need a tool that can orchestrate that complexity. Kubernetes is not just the leading container orchestration solution — it has become the standard.

Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration platform that allows large numbers of containers to work together in harmony and reduces operational burdens. In fact, Kubernetes, originally developed by Google and now managed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), has become the standard for cloud container orchestration, providing a platform for automating deployment, scaling and operations of application containers across multiple clusters of hosts.

  • DevOps teams love the extensibility of Kubernetes, which gives them maximum agility and flexibility when delivering cloud-native applications, whether on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge.
  • Information technology operations (ITOps) teams love Kubernetes because it helps boost productivity, reduce costs and risks, and moves organizations closer to achieving their hybrid cloud goals.
  • CEOs and CIOs love Kubernetes because it helps to significantly increase the agility and efficiency of their software development teams, enabling them to reduce the time and complexity associated with putting differentiated applications into production.  

Kubernetes is not a flash in the pan—it is here to stay—and its prevalence is likely to expand dramatically as software complexity moves to more and more parts of the enterprise. The combination of containers and platform in Kubernetes creates a highly efficient scalable infrastructure ecosystem.

We talk to Isabella Kusumawati from SUSE about her journey

Utilizing open-source solutions together like Kubernetes and SUSE Rancher give users access to a reliable infrastructure solution and platform that doesn’t compromise on confidence, security or useability. Solutions like SUSE Rancher offer a multi-cluster orchestration platform that allows operations teams and developers easily deploy, manage and secure their Kubernetes environment.

Adopting a new technology is never easy. Check out this whitepaper on how to build an enterprise Kubernetes strategy to get started.

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