DevOps.com

  • Latest
    • Articles
    • Features
    • Most Read
    • News
    • News Releases
  • Topics
    • AI
    • Continuous Delivery
    • Continuous Testing
    • Cloud
    • Culture
    • DevSecOps
    • Enterprise DevOps
    • Leadership Suite
    • DevOps Practice
    • ROELBOB
    • DevOps Toolbox
    • IT as Code
  • Videos/Podcasts
    • DevOps Chats
    • DevOps Unbound
  • Webinars
    • Upcoming
    • On-Demand Webinars
  • Library
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events
    • On-Demand Events
  • Sponsored Communities
    • AWS Community Hub
    • CloudBees
    • IT as Code
    • Rocket on DevOps.com
    • Traceable on DevOps.com
    • Quali on DevOps.com
  • Related Sites
    • Techstrong Group
    • Container Journal
    • Security Boulevard
    • Techstrong Research
    • DevOps Chat
    • DevOps Dozen
    • DevOps TV
    • Digital Anarchist
  • Media Kit
  • About
  • AI
  • Cloud
  • Continuous Delivery
  • Continuous Testing
  • DevSecOps
  • Leadership Suite
  • Practices
  • ROELBOB
  • Low-Code/No-Code
  • IT as Code
  • More Topics
    • Application Performance Management/Monitoring
    • Culture
    • Enterprise DevOps

Home » Blogs » DevOps in the Cloud » How a Visual Cloud Management Platform Can Address DevOps Woes

Cloud Management Platform DevOps

How a Visual Cloud Management Platform Can Address DevOps Woes

By: Pradeep Kumar on March 1, 2018 Leave a Comment

DevOps and cloud are a match made in heaven. However, the advantages of the cloud are apparent only when continuous deployment, development, operations and other DevOps tasks can be performed and automated seamlessly on the cloud. Moreover, many of today’s cloud management platforms do not offer much cross-functional visibility, something DevOps engineers require.

Recent Posts By Pradeep Kumar
  • Cloud Performance Management Needs Precedence Over APM in a Cloud World
More from Pradeep Kumar
Related Posts
  • How a Visual Cloud Management Platform Can Address DevOps Woes
  • A Saner Way to Build a DevOps Cloud
  • DevSecOps: Realities of Policy Management
    Related Categories
  • Blogs
  • DevOps in the Cloud
    Related Topics
  • cloud
  • infrastructure
  • infrastructure management
Show more
Show less

A visual cloud management platform can be the answer to ensuring DevOps thrives in a cloud environment. Here are few use cases that highlight how a visual platform can solve a DevOps engineer’s woes:

DevOps/Cloud-Native Live! Boston

Partial Visibility Due to Use of Siloed Infra Management Tools

There are scores of infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and infrastructure automation tools available, with choices for server provisioning, configuration management, automated builds, code deployments, intraservice orchestration and more, from companies including Ansible, CloudFormation, Terraform, Puppet and Chef. But there’s no single tool that meets all needs. At the end of the day, DevOps engineers need to use and manage dozens of siloed IaC tools that help deploy and manage an end-to-end tech stack.

Customizing a tech stack to meet the engineer’s needs—choosing from Docker Swarm or Kubernetes, MySQL or Postgres, Jenkins or CircleCI, and so on—can be overwhelming. Figuring out how to run the code in dev; how to build and test; how to deploy changes; where to find metrics, logs, and alerts; and so on across several tools is easier said than done.

While each orchestration tool provides multiple benefits, engineers also must juggle between multiple dashboards cloud service providers (CSPs) offer. As cloud use increases, complexity and partially visibility are bound to happen, making it difficult to make sense of resource usage and perform root-cause analysis. And if the infrastructure is on a multicloud setup, chances are teams/engineers will lose visibility of resource usage.

A siloed approach to infrastructure management using multiple dashboards is a big ‘no.’

Solution: An interactive and immersive visual cloud management platform provides visibility across resources, apps, tools, etc., with a complete context of resource usage from a single pane of glass. The visual console must be visually rich and intelligent enough to provide context-aware real-time prescriptive insights and help with operations on a topology view.

Visualizing Auto-Scaled Containers and Clusters of Containerized Deployments

Containers are great for making DevOps workflows easier. Their ability to run almost any type of app has made it popular. Today, there are several container orchestration tools available with autoscaling, including Kubernetes. However, when there are large numbers of clusters of containerized deployments, inspecting or monitoring nodes, pods and containers for optimization, cost reduction and handling system malfunctions can get overwhelming.

Solution:  A visual cloud management platform can show containers and its subcomponents in a relationship view with other cloud resources on a live topology view. Such a tool will help DevOps engineers investigate anomalies quickly and easily.

Difficulty in Implementing Resource Dependency Mapping an SDN in a Hybrid Cloud Setup

Software defined networking (SDN), which enables network automation, is typically difficult to define for DevOps, especially in a hybrid environment. Extending network capabilities or automating the network to update itself when there is a change requirement can be quite challenging in a hybrid setup. The need of the hour is a language, such as JSON or XMPP, that will draw dependency mapping and automate network flow with the cognizance of a human.

AWS and other public cloud service providers provide basic-level dependency mapping. However, a DevOps engineer loses visibility across resource usage when a business has a chunk of SDN components integrated with dozens of resources on the public cloud or in multicloud or hybrid cloud environments.

Solution: A visual cloud management platform can map resource dependency on a live topology automatically, analyze and define further network connections and automate operations. With such a tool, a DevOps engineer can easily understand the underlying interconnection, understand the entire infrastructure in a snap and keep the infrastructure hail and healthy.

Finding Unused DR Environments to Maximize Infrastructure Usage

Increasingly, DevOps engineers are using backup capacity as development environments to maximize their infrastructure investment. Disaster recovery (DR) environments represent an ideal workspace for developers to test their code with the help of virtualization technologies and advanced networking. However, mapping all the tool integrations and finding that extra capacity in an ever-changing multicloud or hybrid cloud environment can be challenging.

Solution: A visual cloud management platform can provide visibility into third-party integrations on your cloud and also show any backup capacity available for development use.

Immersive Visual Consoles Becoming the New Normal

A visual cloud management platform that helps DevOps engineers get a complete and viewable context across cloud services, network flow and topology view of the entire infrastructure from a single pane is the way forward. Such a platform is the solution to solve several DevOps woes. It enables visualization of public/private cloud services and third-party integrations, giving engineers the ability to understand the resource and network relationship in real time; get a complete perspective of infrastructure; perform contextual monitoring, cloud operations, root-cause analysis in a snap; and ensure security and compliance from one place.

Let’s look forward to a world in which using these immersive visual consoles will be the new normal.

— Pradeep Kumar

Filed Under: Blogs, DevOps in the Cloud Tagged With: cloud, infrastructure, infrastructure management

Sponsored Content
Featured eBook
The State of Open Source Vulnerabilities 2020

The State of Open Source Vulnerabilities 2020

Open source components have become an integral part of today’s software applications — it’s impossible to keep up with the hectic pace of release cycles without them. As open source usage continues to grow, so does the number of eyes focused on open source security research, resulting in a record-breaking ... Read More
« Integrating Security into DevOps: The Benefits and Drawbacks
Redgate adds fast, repeatable data masking to its database provisioning solution »

TechStrong TV – Live

Click full-screen to enable volume control
Watch latest episodes and shows

Upcoming Webinars

Get Infrastructure Transparency and Improve Your Developers’ Experience in the Process
Thursday, May 19, 2022 - 3:00 pm EDT
Accelerating Continuous Security With Value Stream Management
Monday, May 23, 2022 - 11:00 am EDT
The Complete Guide to Open Source Licenses 2022
Monday, May 23, 2022 - 3:00 pm EDT

Latest from DevOps.com

DevOps Institute Releases Upskilling IT 2022 Report 
May 18, 2022 | Natan Solomon
Creating Automated GitHub Bots in Go
May 18, 2022 | Sebastian Spaink
Is Your Future in SaaS? Yes, Except …
May 18, 2022 | Don Macvittie
Apple Allows 50% Fee Rise | @ElonMusk Fans: 70% Fake | Microsoft Salaries up by 100%?
May 17, 2022 | Richi Jennings
Making DevOps Smoother
May 17, 2022 | Gaurav Belani

Get The Top Stories of the Week

  • View DevOps.com Privacy Policy
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Download Free eBook

DevOps: Mastering the Human Element
DevOps: Mastering the Human Element

Most Read on DevOps.com

How Waterfall Methodologies Stifle Enterprise Agility
May 12, 2022 | Jordy Dekker
Top 3 Requirements for Next-Gen ML Tools
May 13, 2022 | Jervis Hui
Progress Expands Scope of Compliance-as-Code Capabilities
May 12, 2022 | Mike Vizard
15 Ways Software Becomes a Cyberthreat
May 13, 2022 | Anas Baig
Why Over-Permissive CI/CD Pipelines are an Unnecessary Evil
May 16, 2022 | Vladi Sandler

On-Demand Webinars

DevOps.com Webinar ReplaysDevOps.com Webinar Replays
  • Home
  • About DevOps.com
  • Meet our Authors
  • Write for DevOps.com
  • Media Kit
  • Sponsor Info
  • Copyright
  • TOS
  • Privacy Policy

Powered by Techstrong Group, Inc.

© 2022 ·Techstrong Group, Inc.All rights reserved.