Software development teams can transform or constrain a modern organization in today’s digital economy. As such, many organizations are beginning to invest in improving the developer experience, realizing that a frictionless process can improve business results and drive higher performance.
Organizations encounter friction when shifting gears to the cloud and multi-cloud, especially as they scale—and increase when combined with the adoption of Kubernetes and open source.
Many organizations get caught in a big cloud when autonomous business units within the company start using these technologies themselves, taking into account only their unique business needs (as they should), but usually without organizational standards in mind, as each business unit dives into islands. Stacks of technologies, work tools and processes are created, creating development, security and operational challenges.
Lack of a holistic strategy towards tools, processes, talent or management can create silos, inconsistencies and can create more manual handoffs and longer wait times on the way to production. Companies cannot achieve the agility, cost savings or benefits of multi-cloud. Instead of advancing their cloud goals, they create unmanaged risks and add additional friction to software delivery.
McKinsey studied the pipeline problem and noted that, when done right, companies achieve “developer agility”—that is, speed—when they master tools, culture, product management, and talent management. Of these, McKinsey explains, “best-of-breed tools are the primary driver of developer speed.”
“Companies that excel at providing the right tools, culture, product management and talent management not only develop software faster but also deliver significantly stronger business results,” concluded the McKinsey report. Companies that remove “friction points and unleash the full potential of development talent can achieve 60% higher shareholder returns and 20% higher operating margins.
Why haven’t more companies solved their snowflake approach to software development and delivery problems with so much at stake?
First, the software development landscape grows in complexity every year. Even tools that aim to provide more flexibility, such as Kubernetes and containers, have a significant learning curve and are only part of the puzzle. Many companies have not yet invested in the right tools, talent or practices to harness the multicloud and tame its management complexity.
However, viewed differently, multi-cloud provides a compelling opportunity for development, security and operations teams to align and modernize their approach to building, managing and securing cloud-native applications.
Three pillars for controlling multi-cloud application platforms
To control multicloud, reduce risks and remove friction from development processes, we advise organizations to develop their capabilities and resources in these three vital areas.
1 – Platform teams: Evolution from corrupt technology teams to a multidisciplinary platform team responsible for building and operating a set of services and tools for developers to build and operate applications that drive business revenue. They are the glue that connects your development team, IT infrastructure and operations team and security team, but they also manage the requirements from business stakeholders. A good platform team operates with a product mindset; Treating their development teams as customers and Manage their platform like an internal business within a business.
A platform team functions most effectively when they gain visibility into all aspects of DevSecOps—to make real-time adjustments to projects in the development pipeline. To achieve this, a platform team requires a unified data management model that unifies inputs from different sources, the ability to coordinate disparate data into an application, and create dashboards to share with key stakeholders.
A platform team measures what matters to the organization, including KPIs related to performance and results for the lines of business they support, adoption of platform services, productivity and effectiveness of developers using the platform, and metrics related to reliability and security compliance. .
2 – Original architecture standards in the cloud: Many organizations start their Kubernetes journey in the cloud with one of the many managed Kubernetes services available. This helps the startup process and after an initial learning curve, an app team can hit the ground running. Kubernetes and containers bring new layers of abstraction to the application environment that can improve resource utilization and separate additional infrastructure concerns from business logic, enabling accelerated development and delivery cycles.
With multi-cloud Kubernetes, organizations must consider adopting unified platform capabilities across technologies to provide a consistent developer interface, template standardization, and secure supply chains lower the learning curve of Kubernetes best practices and implement DevSecOps practices. Consistent lifecycle and policy management across the various Kubernetes is necessary for operational efficiency and compliance. These capabilities allow you to have a faster and safer way to manufacture for your applications in a flexible and customized way for your business.
3 – Enforce safety rails: Achieving developer speed is a critical goal for a modern organization. But the real trick is speeding up software development without sacrificing security and compatibility along the way. Although good governance is an enabler, well-defined guardrails help communicate these remaining invisible security best practices to the developer and enable this leap. Guardrails ensure that environments start with the correct configurations from the moment they are provisioned.
Effective guardrails must be implemented at every stage of the cloud-native application lifecycle. With policy-driven guardrails, DevSecOps focuses on quickly finding and remediating cloud vulnerabilities to strengthen overall compliance and security posture. The focus then turns to optimizing costs and better aligning cloud spending with application needs and business goals.
Proactive governance
Today, 87% of organizations report using two or more clouds, according to the VMware Research and Insights from 2022. Kubernetes is the platform technology of choice for these deployments, with nearly all (98%) respondents from VMware’s State of Kubernetes 2023 Report Experience the operational benefits of Kubernetes. Kubernetes and multi-cloud have become the technological foundation for modern businesses to accelerate application development and delivery.
Investing in proactive governance guardrails and a secure software supply chain lays the foundation for frictionless application deployments. Establishing a platform team and adopting a product mindset will go a long way toward preparing your organization to succeed in a multi-cloud world. Beyond that, running a platform like a product can increase developer speed, leading to “significant performance improvements,” says McKinsey.
No matter how your firm gets to multi-cloud, with the right tools, talent and product mindset, any company can make multi-cloud a long-term business success.
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