The DX Sandbox: Empower Your Transformation

With the pressing need among enterprises for self disruption and digitalisation, cloud foundries look set to bring DX and DevOps to the next level.

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The DX Sandbox: Empower Your Transformation

Averting multi-cloud sand storms with a DX sandbox

Memories of the severe Amazon Web Services outage last year probably still linger in our minds. Over 70 cloud services were affected globally, yet the Amazon status page showed that all was well. This is the nightmarish disaster scenario—much like a destructive sand storm under the clouds—that faces potentially any enterprise developing digital solutions without extensive testing.

Now imagine having access to a secure hybrid cloud environment in which deploy cloud-enabled solutions, try out daring ideas with Proof-of-Concept demos, and speed up the time-to-rollout for your digital solutions—all in guaranteed safety. Given that such a testbed platform can lead to lower costs, better operational efficiencies and improved productivity, enterprises at various phases of digital transformation can really use such a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

This kind of DX sand box environment is called a cloud foundry, and it is a PaaS that supports the full application development lifecycle, leveraging on a container-based architecture to run apps in any programming language over any multi-cloud environment.

Modelling risks and sand clouds safely

With the pressing need among enterprises for self disruption and digitalisation, cloud foundries look set to bring DX and DevOps to the next level.

  • Development teams can design, test, harden and deploy cloud-enabled solutions in a secure virtual testbed environment without the hassles of dealing with hardware and cloud setups. Application developers can spend more time on coding new features and updating existing ones. Staging environments are reduced and simplified in shortened release cycles.
  • By integrating a virtual sand box for enterprises to model extreme failures, a cloud foundry empowers enterprises to emulate true hybrid conditions, keep compliant with specs, and safely work out all the kinks and potential sand storms that can develop in complex deployment environments.
  • The sheer versatility of virtualised sand boxed DevOps allows more prototypes to be tested in a shorter time frame, for example through frequent hackathons. Simulate different types of disaster scenarios, from the termination of VMs to complex network partitioning problems, packet loss/delay or hardware calamities. The preparedness learned from addressing crises within a sand box will result in more resilient, tougher solutions.
  • The customised and flexible PaaS infrastructure accelerates DX, facilitates fast adoption of new and disruptive technologies, and thereby boosts competitiveness.
  • Even in unanticipated worst-case scenarios, a managed Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DraaS) can be relied on to allow smooth business continuity. This can involves secure, real-time VM replication with failover and failback that can be invoked together or independently.
  • Ultimately, software quality, customer satisfaction, cost savings and business continuity are improved to translate into better CAPEX, ROI and total economic impact

It has often been said that DX is about integration, not silos. However, when it comes to restructuring an enterprise into a agile software-defined environment, a virtual DevOps silo is exactly the PaaS needed for developing and rolling out best-in-class digital solutions. Extensive testing at will, in a realistic sand box (i.e., a Fort Knox) before, during and even after rollout is the long-term key to averting disaster.

And this is no sand storm in a teacup. Rather, in the DX age, intentionally modelling and quelling “storms” to study in a safe, closed-loop environment such as a sand box (the proverbial tea cup), is the most practical way to develop toughened solutions for smooth deployment, zero downtime and high returns on investment.

A Cloud Foundry as a baked-in provision

Do the appealing broad-based benefits of a cloud foundry PaaS make sense for your enterprise? Realise that a cloud foundry’s full potential is tied to the overall versatility of your enterprise’s multi-cloud environment.

The other ingredients needed to reap the full benefits of a cloud foundry include:

  1. private cloud service with the agility, scalability and efficiency of public clouds, but with the greater levels of control and security of a single tenant with a dedicated hosted environment either in your premises or in vendor data centres
  2. hybrid cloud service that provides a more secure, inter-operable multi-cloud solution designed to facilitate seamless application mobility, disaster recovery and migration across multiple clouds
  3. A digital workplace service (WaaS) that combines devices, connectivity, data management and security to enable employees to work on any device, anywhere, anytime
  4. A multi-cloud managed security service that will secure customers’ applications across both private and public clouds

 

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