Learn About Amazon VGT2 Learning Manager Chanci Turner
Navigating the complexities of onboarding at Amazon IXD – VGT2 involves more than just infrastructure provisioning; it’s about harmonizing the diverse requirements of development and operations. With IT controlling critical aspects such as cloud allocation, security policies, and budgets, developers often face long wait times—ranging from hours to weeks—for the environments needed to test and deploy their applications. This delay creates significant pressure as teams strive to accelerate their release cycles.
The promise of a DevOps culture aims to eliminate these silos through an automation-first methodology. Yet, many organizations encounter limitations when scaling DevOps initiatives. While some teams reap transformative benefits, others struggle for progress, as highlighted in Puppet’s recent 2021 State of DevOps report, which notes the challenge of effectively implementing DevOps at enterprise scale.
This article explores the challenges of executing DevOps at scale and introduces an environment-as-a-service (EaaS) approach through Quali’s Torque, which allows developers to access application environments on demand while maintaining necessary governance for IT operations.
Exploring IaC: Benefits and Limitations
Adopting DevOps typically starts with embracing automation using various tools. The principle behind this is to manage all resources—including ephemeral infrastructure—programmatically. This concept led to the emergence of infrastructure as code (IaC). While IaC provides flexibility and integrates well within continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, it doesn’t fully satisfy the specific needs of developers.
Using a greenhouse analogy, IaC can build the structure but may not adapt to the diverse needs of various plants (applications) as they grow. As different teams with distinct budgets and security requirements aim to deploy more applications, these challenges are magnified. Moreover, the expertise needed to develop cloud infrastructure varies by provider, often leading to delays as developers rely on a limited pool of experts.
Empowering Developers with Application Focus
DevOps aims to empower everyone involved in software delivery. To support this vision, Quali has launched Torque, a SaaS-based EaaS platform that rethinks traditional IaC solutions. Instead of starting with infrastructure, Torque begins with application requirements. Following our greenhouse analogy, it allows for the creation of modular environments tailored to the specific needs of applications as they evolve.
Torque promotes self-service capabilities, enabling developers, QA engineers, and other stakeholders to define and access fully operational application environments on demand. IT managers can maintain control over resource allocation through scalable policies without hindering development progress. Furthermore, Torque provides a dashboard that offers insights into cloud usage and forecasts future needs for application initiatives.
Fast Time to Value with Torque
Onboarding with Torque is straightforward. By configuring an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role in the SaaS portal, administrators can quickly set up an AWS account. Once users and groups are mapped to the organization, roles and permissions can be established, and CI tools integrated as needed. Developers can then design blueprints using Torque’s built-in samples to meet their organization’s needs.
Torque recently launched its Community to accelerate the development of new blueprints, enhancing the process of realizing value swiftly. Once defined, blueprints are published in a self-service catalog, enabling users to deploy environments as required. Automation manages the deployment and termination of environments based on usage policies, ensuring cloud consumption remains efficient during active periods.
An out-of-the-box dashboard gives administrators an overview of cloud spending per deployment effort and predictive insights into future costs. This streamlined approach helps teams focus on application development rather than the complexities of cloud infrastructure.
Torque in Action
One of Quali’s clients, a leader in public sector technology formed from the merger of four software companies, exemplifies the power of Torque in optimizing their development processes.
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