The principles of Lean manufacturing have delivered immense business value to diverse industries such as Manufacturing, Automotive, and Industrial Automation. The Lean movement emphasizes techniques that purely add customer value while ridding a platform of technical debt. It is time to talk about these principles to cloud management.
A lean approach to cloud management ensures that the true benefits of a demand-driven, self-servicebased model can be realized. It also means that critical functions like capacity management, chargeback, and operational efficiency can be institutionalized thus realizing cost savings and positively influencing business outcomes.
The Four Key Principles of Lean Cloud Management…
The Four Principles…
Whatever the underlying cloud or infrastructure provider are, CMPs should provide aunified experience across four areas:
- A single view of all types of infrastructure:servers, VMs, Containers, storage and network – across all VM providers and private/public clouds, all the cloud regions and the tenants across these regions.
- A single way for Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) to administer hybrid infrastructure across critical areas such assecurity & identity management
- Unified & open APIfor both developers and operations to perform lifecycle management and easy integrations with point tools or management processes
- Continuous monitoringacross all of the different cloud regions and environments
The most difficult thing about running a Cloud Management Platform is the setup, installation, configuration, and Day 2 operations. As a veteran of the cloud landscape, I have seen enterprises take months (sometimes years!) of round the clock professional services and consulting in order to get a CMP running across even a relatively small fleet of data centers and cloud providers. It is time for the industry to relook its approach to this key area.