Release Automation: The Key to Cloud Modernization

Organizations of all sizes and industries are actively trying to transform themselves in order to better compete and thrive in our increasing digital business environment. A core component of this transformation is modernizing your cloud-based workloads so that they, and by extension your company, become more scalable, cost effective, secure, and agile. But while you are modernizing workloads in the cloud, you also need to modernize their management and deployment. Failing to do so can undercut many of the benefits of migrating to cloud in the first place.

Many organizations have adopted DevOps as a way to improve the development of value-generating software and services. Even so, many still experience challenges including:

• Manual processes, siloed work and handoffs that have resulted in bottlenecks and inefficiencies
• Duplication of effort due to poor communication and collaboration between teams
• Security risks from inconsistent application of security policies and analysis of tradeoffs
• Audit and regulatory compliance risks from a lack of visibility and traceability

A recent survey found that 90 percent of DevOps professionals are under increasing pressure to accelerate the deployment of applications and services. The desire to reduce “time to value”, coupled with the business impact of the challenges noted above, has led to broad acceptance of the need to adopt automation.

A deployment pipeline is an automated version of your process for getting value-generating software from development into the hands of users. And while it helps to speed up this process, it also enables secure, consistent delivery of services aligned to the needs of the business. Release automation is a critical part of any cloud modernization effort. It provides you with a toolchain and workflow to automate the release of your platform infrastructure and application workflows—and, ultimately, to maximize the benefits of cloud computing.

For example, you’ll want to ensure you’re provisioning an instance in Google Cloud with the right image and configuration to meet your security and compliance requirements. By combining an automated deployment process with the native agility baked into Google Cloud, you can employ consistent and expedient processes at scale and accelerate the adoption of secure, compliant deployment practices.

Releasing the benefits of release automation

Release automation increases the velocity of development and shortens release cycles. It facilitates an Agile approach to delivery, specifically by providing an Agile Release Train (ART) function. It’s designed to facilitate modern ways of working, such as test-driven development. And it applies to all layers of the stack, including infrastructure, platforms, services and applications. It also complements, automates and enforces ITIL-esque (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) functions, such as service, configuration, change and release management. By automating traditional ITIL processes for releases, you can achieve consistency, velocity and assurance at scale. And you’ll have confidence knowing these releases meet security and compliance requirements, and will function as expected in your Google Cloud environment.

Take release automation a step further with Pythian’s help

We typically use Terraform to provision infrastructure on Google Cloud. Thanks to its modularity, Terraform works in multi-cloud environments and provides a consistent and well-supported toolchain for IaC development. So whether you’re dealing with a VM configuration, image or container, we deliver essential, targeted IaC tooling required for high-quality, rapid and compliant deployments.

The entire release management process is managed and enforced by a toolchain that ensures that all requirements for release are met and verified automatically, release gates and approvals are obtained, and deployment teams can work at maximum velocity without sacrificing quality or security.

If you’re looking to expedite your journey toward modernization, Pythian can help you drive immediate value with Pythian’s Release Automation QuickStart that can help you:

• Enable release management processes
• Enforce change and configuration policies
• Maximize quality and release velocity, and minimize change failure rates
• Help ensure security, compliance and consistency of infrastructure deployments

Using Release Automation QuickStart, we can help you rapidly deploy a pilot “single path to production” CI/CD environment and drive immediate value—with the potential to scale to any size of deployment across the organization. By focusing on a specific use case, we can increase your “time to value” while creating a strong foundation for your cloud modernization journey.

To find out more about how Release Automation QuickStart for Google Cloud can work for you, email us at info@pythian.com to get started.