What is CloudOps?

CloudOps, or cloud operations, is the collection of strategies, tools, and processes used to manage the delivery, security, performance, and orchestration of IT services running in the cloud.

Some define CloudOps as ITOps (IT operations) applied to cloud architecture, while others consider it to be a blend of ITOps, cloud computing, and DevOps (development operations) principles. The goal of a CloudOps team is to accelerate and optimize business processes that run in the cloud by achieving continuous operations. They rely on analytics, monitoring tools, and automation to manage cloud resources and services.

If you’re running anything on cloud infrastructure, the activities involved in managing that infrastructure fall under the CloudOps umbrella. But CloudOps is more than just cloud management. It combines IT operations and best practices for managing cloud environments to get the most value, efficiency, and flexibility out of cloud services.

CloudOps involves all the management tasks required to keep a cloud environment running as intended—plus the automation of those tasks. Although the scope of responsibilities can vary, the work of a CloudOps team accomplishes 3 main goals: Orchestrate, operationalize, and govern.

Orchestrate

Cloud orchestration is the coordination of automated cloud-management tasks into comprehensive workflows. While teams use automation to execute a variety of tasks individually, cloud orchestration makes it possible for several tasks to work together to serve a specific function or process.

Orchestration tasks may include:

• Provisioning and deprovisioning, sometimes incorporating Infrastructure as Code tools.
• Coordinating infrastructure, networks, and security across hybrid cloud and on-premise datacenters.
• Migrating infrastructure, applications, workloads, data, and other digital assets to the cloud.

Operationalize

After deployment, CloudOps teams are responsible for the day-to-day activities that keep a business’s IT systems running as intended.

Operations tasks may include:

• Using and automating observability tools to get a better view of what’s running and where.
• Troubleshooting and resolving issues with event-driven automation.
• Deploying cloud-based applications and automating continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.
• Managing the lifecycle of an application.
• Patching and maintaining operating systems.
• Configuring systems and components to ensure everything performs as expected.

Govern

Cloud governance is the process of defining, implementing, and monitoring a framework of rules and policies to guide cloud operations and regulate how users work in cloud environments.

Governance tasks may include:

• Creating and managing backups of critical data according to a backup and disaster recovery plan.
• Optimizing infrastructure by turning off unused resources, recovering orphaned instances, and rightsizing cloud resources where necessary.
• Managing disruptions to maintain business continuity.
• Creating, monitoring, and enforcing policies to increase compliance with government regulations and industry standards. 

Cloud environments have a lot of moving parts, and the number of tasks involved in maintaining cloud infrastructure has made them increasingly complex.

Many organizations initially take an ad hoc approach to cloud operations, often adopting new tools and services in a reactive way. This results in elevated costs, a lack of visibility across tools and teams, and a potential increase in security vulnerabilities through an expanded attack surface.

A CloudOps approach is more strategic and proactive. It combines the technologies, teams, and business priorities involved in keeping IT systems running smoothly. It also relies on automation to unite the many processes involved in managing cloud environments.

Organizations that adopt an effective CloudOps strategy realize:

Increased cost savings. Organizations running on cloud infrastructure don’t need to worry about power, cooling, and other facility costs associated with maintaining infrastructure on premise, thus eliminating a major business expense. Cloud services are also more cost effective because they follow a consumption-based billing model. Many major cloud providers―like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure―offer committed spend discounts that scale with usage and reward long-term commitments.

Improved security. Cloud providers are responsible for security at the underlying infrastructure layer. They handle software updates and security patching to reduce the risk of vulnerabilities, and they engage in continuous monitoring to identify and neutralize threats quickly. Most major cloud providers also offer first- and third-party tools and services to help businesses manage cloud security, enforce compliance standards, and protect critical data.

Scalability. Cloud services are easily scalable and able to meet sudden or anticipated increases in demand. You can use application programming interfaces (APIs), an automation tool, or a self-service portal from your chosen cloud platform to quickly provision servers, virtual machines, storage, and bandwidth at the touch of a button.

Fewer disruptions. You can deploy upgrades to cloud infrastructure and applications with minimal downtime, meaning business operations can proceed normally during routine or unplanned updates.

Increased agility. A strategic CloudOps approach aims to automate the manual, mundane tasks that take up a significant amount of time and company resources. By automating everything from cloud migration to application lifecycle management, CloudOps teams can work faster and more efficiently. 

DevOps, a combination of software development and IT operations, is an approach to taking an application from development to deployment more quickly. It relies on coordination between developers and IT operations teams to rapidly build, test, and release applications before putting them in the hands of the customer.

CloudOps applies DevOps best practices to cloud-based infrastructure. Establishing transparency and alignment across teams, creating an agile work environment, and automating the implementation of CI/CD are just some of the practices CloudOps teams borrow from DevOps. 

Using a patchwork solution to manage and automate CloudOps processes is common but not scalable. Management tools often focus on a single use case. They may be easy to use in this way, but organizations usually have to wait for the vendor to add new features to address additional use cases. The tools may not be able to execute numerous automation tasks at once, or they may lack the flexibility to scale on demand. A comprehensive automation solution, like Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform, gives organizations enterprise-level support and the ability to automate all the common CloudOps tasks from a single interface.

Along with choosing the right platform, organizations looking to grow need to adopt a business strategy that embeds a unified cloud-automation solution into every stage of the operational lifecycle. A crucial step in creating an effective strategy is fostering a culture of continuous learning, collaboration, and visibility across teams. Many businesses choose to establish a new organizational structure or team—like an automation Center of Excellence (CoE)—to increase awareness of automation and how it benefits cloud operations. Others may opt for a more organic effort to expand automation adoption and expertise by promoting an automation Community of Practice (CoP).

When internal support for automation is high, businesses get more out of their cloud investment. They also uncover new opportunities to increase operational efficiency through automation, freeing up both human and IT resources to focus on innovation.

Cloud environments are more flexible, efficient, and cost effective than traditional infrastructure. But they reduce visibility across teams and add a layer of complexity that can be difficult to manage with multiple disconnected tools and do-it-yourself solutions.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform offers a unified platform for automating and orchestrating cloud operations across hybrid cloud and multicloud environments. While other solutions require you to navigate between multiple domain-specific tools, Ansible Automation Platform gives you a single interface to manage, track, and optimize common cloud tasks like configuration management, provisioning, and application deployment. 

With the included Event-Driven Ansible feature, you can automate many repetitive IT tasks that slow down operations teams and create reusable automation workflows to deploy, scale, retire, and migrate cloud instances. If you’re a new automation developer, you can download event source plug-ins and other certified and validated Ansible content from Ansible automation hub to help you get started. 

A subscription to Ansible Automation Platform gives you access to an ecosystem of trusted partners to help you automate everything running in the cloud. You also get access to a growing library of Ansible Content Collections, which contain plug-ins, modules, playbooks, roles, and related documentation developed and tested by Red Hat and our technology partners.