DevOps and cloud are a match made in heaven. However, the advantages of the cloud are apparent only when continuous deployment, development, operations and other DevOps tasks can be performed and automated seamlessly on the cloud. Moreover, many of today’s cloud management platforms do not offer much cross-functional visibility, something DevOps engineers require.

A visual cloud management platform can be the answer to ensuring DevOps thrives in a cloud environment. Here are few use cases that highlight how a visual platform can solve a DevOps engineer’s woes:

Partial Visibility Due to Use of Siloed Infra Management Tools

There are scores of infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and infrastructure automation tools available, with choices for server provisioning, configuration management, automated builds, code deployments, intraservice orchestration and more, from companies including Ansible, CloudFormation, Terraform, Puppet and Chef. But there’s no single tool that meets all needs. At the end of the day, DevOps engineers need to use and manage dozens of siloed IaC tools that help deploy and manage an end-to-end tech stack.

Customizing a tech stack to meet the engineer’s needs—choosing from Docker Swarm or Kubernetes, MySQL or Postgres, Jenkins or CircleCI, and so on—can be overwhelming. Figuring out how to run the code in dev; how to build and test; how to deploy changes; where to find metrics, logs, and alerts; and so on across several tools is easier said than done.

While each orchestration tool provides multiple benefits, engineers also must juggle between multiple dashboards cloud service providers (CSPs) offer. As cloud use increases, complexity and partially visibility are bound to happen, making it difficult to make sense of resource usage and perform root-cause analysis. And if the infrastructure is on a multicloud setup, chances are teams/engineers will lose visibility of resource usage.

A siloed approach to infrastructure management using multiple dashboards is a big ‘no.’

Solution: An interactive and immersive visual cloud management platform provides visibility across resources, apps, tools, etc., with a complete context of resource usage from a single pane of glass. The visual console must be visually rich and intelligent enough to provide context-aware real-time prescriptive insights and help with operations on a topology view.

Visualizing Auto-Scaled Containers and Clusters of Containerized Deployments

Containers are great for making DevOps workflows easier. Their ability to run almost any type of app has made it popular. Today, there are several container orchestration tools available with autoscaling, including Kubernetes. However, when there are large numbers of clusters of containerized deployments, inspecting or monitoring nodes, pods and containers for optimization, cost reduction and handling system malfunctions can get overwhelming.

Solution: A visual cloud management platform can show containers and its subcomponents in a relationship view with other cloud resources on a live topology view. Such a tool will help DevOps engineers investigate anomalies quickly and easily.

Difficulty in Implementing Resource Dependency Mapping an SDN in a Hybrid Cloud Setup

Software defined networking (SDN), which enables network automation, is typically difficult to define for DevOps, especially in a hybrid environment. Extending network capabilities or automating the network to update itself when there is a change requirement can be quite challenging in a hybrid setup. The need of the hour is a language, such as JSON or XMPP, that will draw dependency mapping and automate network flow with the cognizance of a human.

AWS and other public cloud service providers provide basic-level dependency mapping. However, a DevOps engineer loses visibility across resource usage when a business has a chunk of SDN components integrated with dozens of resources on the public cloud or in multicloud or hybrid cloud environments.

Solution: A visual cloud management platform can map resource dependency on a live topology automatically, analyze and define further network connections and automate operations. With such a tool, a DevOps engineer can easily understand the underlying interconnection, understand the entire infrastructure in a snap and keep the infrastructure hail and healthy.

Finding Unused DR Environments to Maximize Infrastructure Usage

Increasingly, DevOps engineers are using backup capacity as development environments to maximize their infrastructure investment. Disaster recovery (DR) environments represent an ideal workspace for developers to test their code with the help of virtualization technologies and advanced networking. However, mapping all the tool integrations and finding that extra capacity in an ever-changing multicloud or hybrid cloud environment can be challenging.

Solution: A visual cloud management platform can provide visibility into third-party integrations on your cloud and also show any backup capacity available for development use.

Immersive Visual Consoles Becoming the New Normal

A visual cloud management platform that helps DevOps engineers get a complete and viewable context across cloud services, network flow and topology view of the entire infrastructure from a single pane is the way forward. Such a platform is the solution to solve several DevOps woes. It enables visualization of public/private cloud services and third-party integrations, giving engineers the ability to understand the resource and network relationship in real time; get a complete perspective of infrastructure; perform contextual monitoring, cloud operations, root-cause analysis in a snap; and ensure security and compliance from one place.

Let’s look forward to a world in which using these immersive visual consoles will be the new normal.

— Pradeep Kumar