The End of Sneaker Code Deployment

And now that you don’t have to decide this, the architectural design of your Cloud is the most important next consideration. Taking an easy lift-and-shift approach from ‘on-premise’ architecture to all IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a- Service) architecture in the Cloud doesn't leverage the Cloud's real capabilities and cost saving potentials. It's time to embrace a new overall architecture.

Development, QA and production Environments have to be completely separated from each other. This allows for the specific integration of other Cloud services like PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) or SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) into the different environments. These services are generally more cost effective than provisioning IaaS add-ons like larger storage devices or static web services. In addition, multiple challenges can be solved by provisioning an independent environment alongside the QA environments with all the ‘tools’ necessary to copy code from one QA environment to the next. Access to QA environments can be restricted to this new environment. The independent environment will prevent any undocumented fixes accidentally pushed into the production environment and will act as a centralized login environment for better access control. The independent environment would also be the preferred candidate for holding common and security services for all environments (Development, QA and production). Common services are those that all environments would consume like name servers or enterprise directories. Security services are composed out of authentication and authorization services, as well as, traffic restricting or optimizing units. The benefits don't stop there. On a long term basis, it prepares development, QA, engineering, and operation teams alike, to think in a more DevOps manner. Dealing with entirely separate environments and working with these enclosed environments is half way to DevOps on the people and process side. On the technology side all that is missing to DevOps are the automation tools. Automation tools will help further streamline the process but that will need a lot of effort to analyze and configure to get them up and running.

The right Cloud architecture will achieve a more structured and controlled code deployment. It is the start of an exciting journey towards DevOps.

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