Developers want to build and innovate, and do it quickly. They don’t want to spend their time on the manual, time-consuming provisioning of an on-premises infrastructure, especially when it only provides a limited toolset compared to public cloud. On the other hand, solely public cloud infrastructure is not practical, because developers need to continually use in-house tools and data. And then, there is the need to meet enterprise requirements around maintaining data security, supporting legacy systems and controls.
Neither purely private nor public cloud infrastructures can meet these diverse business and developer needs. This is why hybrid cloud is quickly becoming the go-to model for enterprise IT. According to Forrester research, “improved security and compliance” is the top-cited benefit of hybrid cloud amongst IT decision-makers.1 While application developers indicate that they appreciate hybrid cloud’s swift access to compute, storage and network resources and easy scalability.
In a recent webinar, “Enable Developers in A Hybrid Cloud World,” our guest speaker Chris Gardner, a senior analyst at Forrester, joins Darren Pulsipher, an enterprise solutions architect at Intel, to discuss Forrester’s exploration of the close relationship between hybrid cloud and DevOps.
In the webinar, Gardner shares some interesting findings based on the commissioned survey conducted by Forrester Consulting of 515 managers with either purchasing and budgetary authority or influence around cloud platforms for their organization. When asked why they used multiple cloud environments, the number one reason survey participants cited was to offer developers a broader range of cloud development environments, tools, and services.
Hybrid cloud can also help enterprises attract and retain top talent. There is high competition for highly skilled and productive app developers. According to a leading talent search firm, “Developers want room to grow. They understand critical work tasks will always be the priority, but they also want to work at a company that understands their desire to continue to expand and build on their current knowledge.”2 A quarter of the respondents in Forrester’s survey indicated that “higher developer satisfaction” was one of the top benefits of using hybrid cloud.
With 42 percent of survey participants planning to migrate more core traditional business applications to cloud platforms and 40 percent planning to build more new applications in the cloud in the next two years, it’s clear that enterprises consider hybrid cloud a powerful way to foster innovation, control cost and give operations teams the ability to select the optimal environment for each workload.
As with any emerging technology, following best practices can accelerate success and multiply business value. In the second half of the webinar, the presenters provide a detailed explanation of the following five tips for enabling hybrid cloud DevOps:
· Embrace experimentation
· Explore beyond traditional toolsets
· Enable continuous delivery through automation
· Manage by consensus, not edict
· Build a hybrid cloud operating model
By implementing these hybrid cloud best practices and taking advantage of today’s management and orchestration tools, your enterprise can maintain speed of development and governance regardless of platform. View the webinar today to set your developers up for success with hybrid cloud, encourage composable infrastructure to drive DevOps methodologies, and maintain security and control in a hybrid cloud environment.