No Strategy? Do Not Pass Go
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As technology leaders, we are always looking for ways to build applications faster. Speed to market is imperative in this particular category, and many times it is the differentiating factor between the winners and losers. But trying to accelerate application building and speeding up your development while the world in the cloud becomes increasingly more complex proves challenging. How do you prioritize speed while maintaining quality with your cloud development? Infrastructure as Product offers solutions to Engineering leaders who need to prioritize speed in the cloud.
Infrastructure as Product can be defined as infrastructure configured as part of a platform required to support specific applications. IaP takes common scenarios and builds out a fully automated infrastructure so development teams can focus on their application. The specific attributes of an IaP include:
IaP mainly solves issues of time-to-delivery and time-to-value. Embedded within each of those areas are other solutions including adherence to security and the architecture and patterns/best practices for that cloud provider.
Why does infrastructure take so long? As Yevgeniy Brikman points out in “Terraform Up and Running”, below are the estimated timelines for certain application profiles to get ready for production:
When we drill down into what exactly the reasons are for those long times, it comes down to the following:
As microservices continue to be a favored implementation approach, a critical piece to cloud applications these days is referred to as a service mesh. The service mesh refers to all of those components that are required for your app to run well in a production environment and are stitched together in a secure and performant manner. Specific mesh components in the world of microservices include logging, visualization, service discovery, tracing and persistence. All of these need to be configured and managed in a way that gives your team the confidence that these will be in place as the application demands it. But the mesh can also create a mess of questions. Choosing components in each of these categories is hard – do you go with open source solutions or lock in with a particular cloud provider? Do you consider off the shelf commercial solutions that require a license? And how do you get all of these things working together seamlessly when you are dealing with multiple versions and compatibility issues between them?
It’s one thing to get a proof of concept application demonstrable for an internal audience. It’s another to have a scalable, production-ready application that can meet the needs in many areas––availability, security, performance. The keywords here are “production-ready”. IaP provides a quick start by having those aspects of the application (infrastructure and mesh) already handled for you.
Many times in my career I have built similar applications, as have my colleagues in other companies. There’s really only a handful of application profiles that most dev teams are building. Some of the most popular ones include:
Any time we’re talking about infrastructure, infrastructure-as-code (IaC) is the center of the conversation. IaC gives us the ability to automate everything and make it repeatable. Cloud infrastructure objects are not created through graphical web-based consoles, but are instead provisioned just like application code and in many ways are even more critical.
While most cloud providers have their own IaC capability, the cloud agnostic one is Terraform from HashiCorp. Terraform is the IaC tool of choice in delivering IaP solutions.
Before you begin developing that next game-changing application, check out the portfolio of IaP solutions on the market in order to help speed up your development. Regardless of whether you have a AAA caliber DevOps team or are just getting going, IaP can be the catalyst in getting your product to market quicker and beating your competition.
Dave Moore is the Chief Innovation Officer at Growth Acceleration Partners. He advises leaders on technology and cloud as customers continue with their digital transformation journeys. He’s focused on building IaP solutions to make things easier for companies looking to scale smarter. You can connect with Dave on LinkedIn, or send him an email.
In this article: The pitfalls of a one-dimensional strategyStrategies provide the framework for collaborationDecision-makers are crucial Strategies create sustainable project flow…
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