CloudOps – is this DevOps??

In a Gartner report published in this year, end user spending on public Cloud services is expected to exceed $480 billion next year. This means the digital revolution will keep accelerating and customers will get to see the difference – in terms of getting access to services and products more rapidly. The driver for this change is the “customer” of course; and all this new change is possible since organizations are getting agile. These companies are determined to stay ahead of competition and hence transform themselves. This change over has given birth to new roles, new departments and introducing new ways of working.

When we say departments, organizations migrating or operating on Cloud; have a dedicated team called “CloudOps” – which means a team that manages Cloud Operations. I observed that mostly organizations setup a new team of skilled experts on Cloud and make them accountable for operations on Cloud (which could be AWS, Azure, Google, etc). Alternatively, have also noted that few other organizations prefer this new team to emerge from their existing infrastructure operations team; where folks are identified and trained on Cloud. So, at one hand if speed to deliver is of priority; then hiring skilled folks helps; else grooming existing teams to monitor and manage Cloud is an option too. In any case, everyone in the company should be appraised of the Cloud and its importance. This is needed since it impacts the way we develop our applications, the way we reach out to our customers, the way we operate. But one thing that pops up is that – is this CloudOps team actually a DevOps team?

Well, both the terms -CloudOps and DevOps are very relevant today. They have well-defined purposes but compliment each other well. If the former focuses on operational efficiencies on Cloud services; the latter stays focused on how team develop and operate in any environment. Both target to deliver faster services through effective team connects and automation levers; result is increased team productivity . A CloudOps team leverages DevOps practices like automation (CI/CD/CM) to ensure that operations are done efficiently. Operational tasks like commissioning or decommissioning or to say monitoring Cloud resources are automated and made transparent to teams for quick action if needed. In some cases, I observed that CloudOps teams and DevOps teams (generally referred as automation team, working with development and operations teams) collaborate with each other on implementing automated use cases across different setups (on-prem, on-cloud). An excellent scenario is building “self-service catalogs” – where a dedicated focus on designing, developing, testing, deploying and continuously improving catalog portal is needed. These teams work together, leverage Kanban practices and evolve as they grow. While the basic mission of a CloudOps team is to manage and monitor Cloud resources; but they do collaborate with other teams to drive the DevOps culture. What is your experience in this regard??

Found a good article that differentiates between CloudOps and DevOps – MUST READ !!