How to Modernize IT Operations for a Cloud-Native World

Once upon a time, running workloads on public cloud IaaS services was cutting-edge. So were IT operations teams that understood how to deploy, monitor, and secure the VM-based monoliths that operated in those cloud environments.

But those days are gone. Today, businesses are moving from “classic” IaaS services to full-on “cloud-native” environments. They’re replacing VMs and monoliths with containers and microservices, which they deploy across clusters of distributed nodes and orchestrate using tools like Kubernetes.

In a cloud-native world, the IT operations strategies that worked when IaaS was at the center of software environments no longer suffice. Instead, modern businesses need a truly cloud-native approach to IT operations.

Here’s what that means and how your team can bring its IT operations strategy up to speed with cloud-native computing – and transition from classic cloud services to a fully cloud-native architecture along the way.

The shift from classic cloud to cloud-native

At first, migrating from an IaaS-based cloud strategy to a cloud-native approach may not seem like a big deal from an operational perspective. After all, most of your workloads still run in the cloud in either case, so that you can deploy and manage them in basically the same way, right?

Well, not quite. When you shift to a fully cloud-native strategy, IT operations challenges change in a variety of significant ways:

• Greater complexity: When containers and serverless functions replace VMs, you have more moving pieces to deploy, observe and update within your cloud environment, creating a fundamentally higher degree of operational complexity.
• More alerts: Along similar lines, you’re likely to face a much higher volume of alerts from cloud-native environments, and you may struggle to determine which ones are the most critical.
• Configuration creep: Microservices, orchestration layers, service meshes, etc., require more configuration files than simple VMs. As a result, it’s harder to keep all of your configurations consistent and up-to-date.
• Compliance challenges: Enforcing governance and compliance rules is more rigid in cloud-native environments due to the complexity of application architectures and the distributed nature of your environment.
• Broader attack surface: From a security perspective, the multiple layers of cloud-native application stacks mean more potential attack vectors and more room for making configuration or deployment mistakes that could result in a breach.

All of the above means that, in a cloud-native environment, system administrators – even those who thrived in conventional, IaaS-based cloud environments – can quickly become bogged down with challenges that they have never encountered before. Unless they achieve a new level of efficiency and visibility, they risk being unable to keep up with the operational demands of the cloud-native environments they have built.

The five pillars of cloud-native IT operations

Fortunately, operations teams can tame the complexity of the cloud-native world. Doing so hinges on implementing what we like to call the five “pillars” of modern, cloud-native IT operations.

When you have these pillars in place, you’ve achieved Modern Cloud Operations Services – meaning those that fully unlock cloud-native architectures instead of merely deploying applications in the cloud using IaaS.

Automation

First and foremost, operations teams need to automate whenever and wherever they can.

Although some work will always require manual effort, admins must leverage tools like Infrastructure-as-Code platforms to provision cloud-native resources automatically. They should configure autoscaling policies to adjust the size of clusters without waiting on human intervention. They should take an immutable infrastructure approach and treat cloud resources like “cattle” instead of “pets,” making it easier to deploy and redeploy applications and infrastructure quickly. And so on.

Observability

Forget conventional monitoring. In a cloud-native environment, operations teams need an observability strategy that makes it possible to collect, analyze, and correlate vast and disparate streams of data. Examples include container logs, Kubernetes metrics, application traces, and possibly even things like CI/CD pipeline data.

At the same time, teams must work harder to align cloud configurations with performance and financial goals. Instead of merely tracking how many VMs they have running, they may need to configure alarms that alert engineers when the number of desired Pods in a Kubernetes cluster diverges sharply from actual Pods. This change could indicate both performance problems and excessive spending.

Reliability

Keeping cloud-native applications running requires more than configuring automated failover between VMs or performing periodic image-based backups. You need a comprehensive strategy for identifying, analyzing, and remediating all reliability challenges that may arise in a cloud-native environment. Problems can range from failures on the part of your cloud provider or ISP to corruption of container images to configuration mistakes that lead to improper cluster sizing to buggy code inside your microservices and far beyond.

Security

In a cloud-native environment, security management must be as automated and holistic as possible to address the various threats that may arise across a cloud-native application stack. Instead of relying on manual response to threats, leverage automated remediation policies to block risks as soon as they appear by, for example, isolating insecure endpoints or revoking the permissions of inactive users.

At the same time, it’s critical to ensure that you have comprehensive visibility into the state of your resources’ security. Rather than monitoring threats by searching through logs alone, you need to expose security metrics from deep within your applications. You’ll also want to leverage visibility sources like Kubernetes audit logs and continuously validate cloud IAM configurations to detect risks within highly dynamic environments.

Cost efficiency

A significant reason businesses are going cloud-native is that it can save money – but only if operations teams carefully track and optimize cloud spending in ways that weren’t important with classic IaaS.

For example, in a serverless environment where cloud service providers bill you for every hundredth of a second that your functions run, reducing the run time by mere fractions of a second could result in massive cost savings. That level of cost optimization would not be as critical with conventional cloud VMs.

Modernizing cloud operations with a trusted partner

If modernizing your IT operations processes for cloud-native environments sounds intimidating, you’re not alone. Cloud-native technologies can be very complex and are evolving so rapidly that even the most seasoned admins don’t always know where to start planning a cloud-native operations strategy.

Don’t get stuck in the mud trying to figure out how to evolve operations to meet cloud-native challenges—instead, partner with a Managed Service provider (MSP) specializing in supporting cloud-native workloads. A partner experienced in cloud-native operations empowers your team to be more innovative and productive. It’s a win-win situation all around.

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