IT organizations now have a new charter: Go faster. Not just ensuring availability and providing reliable IT services is not enough. Accelerating operations has quickly risen to top of the IT prioritization lists.
Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), a new research firm, found that 67% IT decision-makers felt pressured to accelerate IT infrastructure deployment to support developers as well as line-of business teams. This direct connection between IT operations, revenue creation, is driving acceleration demands.
Public cloud services have been transformative for companies that want to get faster access technology and infrastructure resources. But the chances of competitive differentiation may be shrinking. Digital initiatives can give us a competitive advantage, but cloud adoption is so widespread that it is not enough to be ahead of the rest.
As cloud computing becomes more disaggregated, organizations are losing out on the benefits. As organizations race to scale up their operations, modernize applications, and accelerate development, container adoption has exploded. Container usage for production applications, both stateless and stateful, has also risen.
Container adoption delivers numerous benefitsSoftware development has improved in speed and quality. The complexity of containerized environments, spread across multiple public clouds providers and data centers, hinders the acceleration benefits that fueled container adoption.
Why is this complexity increasing?
IT is not an easy job. Complexity problems arise when you combine the pressures of operating faster and scaling up with little or no increase in staff. This is especially true for new technologies like Kubernetes and containers.
Organizations have increased their use containers for stateless and stateful production applications, whether it is part of a DevOps strategy or because they want to use public cloud infrastructure. These activities increase the demand on IT to speed up resource provisioning and enable developers to self-provision resources to keep up with development activities. App environments that are more portable due to containerized applications are more likely to span multiple data centres and public clouds. This situation has the following side effects that can create problems for the business as well as its IT organization.
- IT teams often speed up the process of allocating resources and delegate it to developers. They make less effort to ensure that these resources meet the application needs. This often leads to organizations overprovisioning, which increases overhead.
- The increased portability and portability of containerized environments means that there are more places to manage, more public clouds to understand, and more internal teams to coordinate.
- Tracking the cost of IT resources can quickly become difficult as IT uses resources based on their usage across multiple public clouds environments. ESG found that 63% organizations felt that lack of visibility into cloud spending was a barrier to their IT planning.
Despite organizations working to speed up operations, there is often an increase in complexity that leads to increased costs and inefficiencies. These costs, while they are important to manage, can become a significant burden for fast-growing digital companies. The result: Increased inefficiency associated with usage-based service steals budget from new initiatives, ultimately slowing the pace of innovation.
These are the challenges you need to address.
Hire more people.It is difficult to find container experts and even more difficult to retain. You also need to consider the opportunity costs. Internal personnel should not be focused on infrastructure optimization but rather on creating business value by developing and implementing new innovations. Avoid this option.
You can outsource complex problems.Although it may seem new to you, developing a modern container practice is not difficult for anyone. Use Container experts with years of experience. Taos, an IBM company that specializes in DevOps and multi-cloud services, is an interesting option. Taos can tailor its guidance to meet your organization’s specific needs with its Application Modernization Advisory Service. Taos can help increase container-based workload adoption while reducing risk. Taos can help you replatform applications in containerized environments and rearchitect monolithic apps into a microservices architecture.
Make smarter, AI-based decisionsTraditional methods can be too dependent on the knowledge and experience of a few individuals within an organization. While tools can provide greater insight into application behavior, figuring out next steps is often more of a guesswork than a data-driven process. Some firms are now looking to incorporate AI into their processes. StormForge, for example, is a cloud-based platform that uses machine intelligence and integrated performance testing in order to recommend optimizations for Kubernetes app deployments. StormForge uses iterative experiments as part of its process to help organizations understand and visualize tradeoffs between infrastructure decisions, multiple metrics, such as availability, time, cost, and performance. This helps them make the best business decisions.
Success in the digital age of business depends on optimizing infrastructure resources, accelerating IT operations, and optimizing application development. Many companies waste valuable budget dollars not optimizing their environment, such as their container usage. Increases. Companies waste too much time trying to optimize the environment using existing tools. Use outside intelligence. This can be in the form either of services or better AI tools.
TechTarget has a division called ESG.