The key to success is finding the right platform for the migration and life cycle. You need to ask your cloud migration providers the right questions to evaluate the tools and how CI/CD features, functions, and cloud lifecycle management can benefit your cloud migration journey.
“DevOps has evolved to enable businesses to adapt quickly to the changing world. However, implementing DevOps requires fully integrated tools to enable end-to-end journey from planning to deployment of applications and workloads”.
Automated Cloud Migration is an integral part of DevOps
End-to-end automation is key to implementing DevOps, where release orchestration works as a fundamental building block to manage end-to-end software release pipelines all the way through deployment of applications in the cloud.
After cloud migration, release orchestration improves the overall performance of the workflow setup and increases the return on your DevOps investment. During this process, no other running tasks are disturbed nor changed. Release orchestration helps you take full advantage of technology and tools you have developed and employed in the cloud.
Enterprise-focused release orchestration implementation goes one step further to maximize the benefits by offering crucial real-time visibility in release pipelines with detailed reporting and analytics. It also provides the intelligence required to make a quick decision like efficiently managing and optimizing the release cycles and help modify release plans in an auditable manner in the DevOps environment.
Ideally, Release orchestration tools should facilitate complete control over enterprise release cycles while enabling flexibility at the cluster/application level and enable traceability and compliance. The best part of the release orchestration is that it is resilient to manage both manual and automated tasks for both Business and Technology teams. Hence enterprises must understand the importance of release orchestration to extract more out of DevOps practices post cloud migration.
Here are the 5 steps to unlock the benefits of DevOps post Cloud Migration!
Your research on the tools and processes should include the following factors.
1. Role-based reporting, alerts, and dashboards: Each release cycle for enterprise applications are complex and can involve multiple stakeholders who will need different levels of visibility. Dashboards and Alerts enable faster visibility into failures of jobs running release. It creates actionable alerts for various stakeholders by providing unique, role-based, and customizable alerts. It also provides much better predictability of the timeline of the release.
2. Dynamic and simple workflow creation: The creation of dynamic workflow should be performed with plugins that match industry-leading enterprise tools and automation. Conduct a thorough analysis of the workflow and ensure whether your workflow has a logical flow by breaking down the process into stages. Note down the requirement, and check if your solution provider can be proactive to support creating a dynamic, and simple workflow. This way, you can drill more in-depth and plan each as a group with tasks, which eventually helps you during the cloud migration process.
3. Create triggers: As mentioned earlier, the Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) pipeline is a crucial component of your cloud migration and your solution provider should be able to create a customizable trigger of applications in the CI/CD pipeline.
4. Automation tools: Your cloud migration solution provider must be able to automate much of the cloud migration process including the automatically discovering your applications and their dependencies, automatically creating the correct landing zones in the cloud of your choice, automatically producing the infrastructure as code to modernize your application, and finally automatically executing the migration itself. Integration with DevOps tools (like Jenkins, GitLab, Bamboo, Bitbucket/GIT, SonarQube, Fortify, etc.) is the last step in your automated cloud migration journey.
5. Release calendar: The process of migration to the cloud can be disruptive, no matter how much you prepare. However, your cloud migration solution provider can help you ease the process with a release calendar. The calendar can strategically schedule release tasks to detail the release types with a pipeline that you can customize as per the specific needs of your business.
Successful release orchestration boosts the DevOps approach to enable enterprises to simplify application delivery, enhance the delivery cadence, quality, and visibility of the workflow. With modern businesses moving at the speed of the cloud, you should be capable enough to unlock the benefits of DevOps using release orchestration after cloud migration.
Automated Cloud Migration which includes the automatic generation of the Infrastructure as Code to modernize your applications is a critical part of ending up with an effective DevOps process in the cloud.
To learn more about our automated discovery capabilities, please visit the Matilda Discover page.
To lean more about our automated migration capabilities, please visit the Matilda Migrate page.
Want to learn more?
Click here to schedule a demo with our team of experts.