Cloud Platforms
Unlock new levels of productivity, harness the public cloud faster and more efficiently.
Talk to the team Book a Free Cloud ConsultationWhat is a Cloud Platform?
A Cloud Platform is a suite of tools and services built bespoke by an organisation to enable its teams to use a public cloud vendor to run their applications. The cloud platform can be a shared service, or it could be an inner-source project. Typical public cloud vendors require extensive configuration before an organisation can run its services, often increasing lead times. However, the process becomes iterative once an organisation begins onboarding new teams.
The goal for a cloud platform is to allow an organisation to leverage a cloud vendor like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud but maintain common standards, compliance and governance and deliver new applications and services in shorter time frames. The best cloud platforms offer a flexible approach enabling teams to build their cloud platform or use a shared service. Smaller divisions with fewer requirements may opt for the shared service, and larger divisions with more developers and more demanding operational requirements might want to run their own. The two approaches we favour are Inner Source cloud platforms and shared services.
What does a Cloud Platform do?
They enable an organisation to accelerate the speed with which their divisions and teams of developers build, test and deploy code and provision cloud infrastructure services. They integrate third-party tools and set up logging and monitoring services. The cloud platform also contains the configuration to build hosting environments. Cloud platforms also integrate the various services required to run your applications and remove infrastructure once done (i.e. housekeeping for cloud infrastructure).
Cloud Vendors make Cloud Platforms Easier
AWS has Account isolation, Google has Project level isolation, and Microsoft Azure has subscription-level isolation. Organisations leveraging these cloud providers can build compliance and governance by leveraging the tools available at the account, project or subscription. From here, you can manage many different features; for example, as part of access control, you can configure that s3 buckets are always private. In addition, it is possible to require that an ec2 instance has a security group blocking all ingress traffic. Isolating users by account, project, or subscription would complement the inner source model well because the Inner Source will speed up the development of a cloud platform at the team level while also providing the necessary ability to navigate the compliance and governance hurdles.
While a single cloud platform is simpler to conceive for a rapidly growing organisation, it can hinder the development of a software product.
Workflows
Configurations
Integrations
Automation
Cloud Platform as a Shared Service or with Inner Source?
Inner Source
Inner Source is a concept of building software within an organisation following the open-source model. Developers have access to shared internal source code they can easily fork, customise and deploy. A cloud platform based on an Inner Source framework will contain source code to integrate and deploy applications to a cloud vendor and configure the many non-functional requirements using reusable modules. Inner source development enables teams to share source to reduce the complexity of cloud platform deployments and enable them to provision their services based on their needs and include compliance and governance features. To conclude, for organisations fostering autonomous teams, Inner Source is best.
How to differentiate what teams need?
Inner Source helps teams differently; for example, assume teams part of an e-commerce division would have some tighter integration points. The build, deployment and hosting platforms will be the same. The Inner Source for these teams will consist of a common configuration module that manages the cloud platform setup for the whole e-commerce division, and each team will have its independent modules that manage each of their services. These modules would be in some kind of infrastructure as code language for example Hashicorp Terraform or AWS Cloudformation. The e-commerce division would be responsible for duplicating and modifying the original source for their own use and committing this into their repository. That is not all because once the team provisions the cloud platform they have to manage it. A team not prepared to manage a cloud platform should avoid this approach.
Shared Services
Shared services are a common strategy in which organisations manage the use of cloud vendors with the assistance of a shared cloud platform that they build to run different workloads for the teams internally. This shared cloud platform provides all the requirements for hosting applications and has non-production and production counterparts. The main benefit of a shared service model is cloud resources are not managed directly by developers. Smaller teams or divisions may need more staffing to own and operate a fully-fledged cloud platform. With a shared service, they can focus on business as usual.
How to differentiate what teams need?
In the previous example, we imagined an e-commerce division of multiple teams. However, not all divisions have these kinds of requirements. Shared service platforms are great for divisions and teams that would otherwise need to hire more people but don’t need to.
Case Studies
Chatbot Platform for LVMH
We created a platform to build and deliver dozens of natural language learning chatbots to help improve customer service on the websites for maisons like Tag Heuer, Sephora, 24Sevres.
DevOps Support in China
How hard can it be to support a development team in mainland China? We encountered many challenges, many surprises but helped them deliver the application.
Cloud Migration for our High Volume Retailer Customer
How a major UK supermarket transitioned from monthly releases to 50 releases a day with Servana. Find out how in this case study.
We offer the following Cloud Platform Services
Get experienced DevOps consultants on a flexible basis into your teams to unblock your developers, build great software and the cloud platforms to run it.
Unblock your developers with professional support for DevOps Tools, Practices and Cloud Services.
Unblock your developers and improve developer experience, quality of software and delivery frequency without the disruption.
Retire your existing application hosting. Get a fully managed cloud-native hosting service to improve any applications reliability and user experience.
We offer the following Cloud Platform Servicess
Get experienced DevOps consultants on a flexible basis into your teams to unblock your developers, build great software and the cloud platforms to run it.
Unblock your developers with professional support for DevOps Tools, Practices and Cloud Services.
Unblock your developers and improve developer experience, quality of software and delivery frequency without the disruption.
Retire your existing application hosting. Get a fully managed cloud-native hosting service to improve any applications reliability and user experience.
Insights
What are the key components of a DevOps practice
We focus on why DevOps practices are so important. Practices like infrastructure as code, pipelines for Automation, security, CICD and monitoring.
Strategies to improve the Developer Experience
We explore the human side of DevOps and discuss why culture is so important in achieving success. This is based on our own experience being involved with a variety of DevOps transforations.
What is a DevOps Culture?
We explore the human side of DevOps and discuss why culture is so important in achieving success. This is based on our own experience being involved with a variety of DevOps transforations.
How DevOps eliminates constraints within silos
An organisation is like a machine. It has parts that need to work together to achieve a desired outcome. How can DevOps help you improve this process?
FAQ
Your questions answered.
Yes. If you use cloud services for infrastructure as a service, a cloud platform will reduce costs through efficiency gains from management and automation. There are also improvements to organisational integration. Each new team that uses the cloud platform can contribute to the cost of their own services and underlying infrastructure. For example they can be charged an equivalent share of the OPEX cost of the cloud platform which can be itemised with the capabilities of the cloud vendor. This reduces the share of OPEX the organisation has to attribute to resources with out a legitimate cost centre. There is also an element of efficiency because cloud vendors provide on-demand infrastructure services being able to automate the lifecycle of this infrastructure is important. One objective of a Cloud Platform is to provide automation around hosting applications that can include lifecycle mamanagement for servers and related infrastructure. Doing this will mean your CAPEX investment will reduce the OPEX over time. The chances of having a positive return on investment are also quite high.
Without a cloud platform, the entry cost for every new tool is low. Low entry costs make it easy to accumulate similar tools increasing costs on subscription services while making it difficult to rationalise the value. The right approach would be integrating a tool into the cloud platform so that all users, like software developers, use it automatically.
With a cloud platform, demanding software projects can move faster without unnecessary blocking or bottlenecks. There is no need to unleash the software developers on the cloud vendor and accumulate technical debt while trying to build infrastructure automation in parrallel.
It is possible to limit the impact of not having a cloud platform in the early days when there is a small team (i.e. less than five people on the project). However, once the first software development pipeline and integration environment is ready, replicating capabilities is possible, which can scale with the project.
Without a cloud platform, it can take time to provision cloud services for teams and require the involvement of more than one team. These delays and processes increase the costs as the development teams will put effort into organising the setup and need to meet with all stakeholders and follow the progress from development to delivery.
Some of our Customers, Accreditations & Independent Reviews.
The high confidence we currently have on our platform infrastructure and deployment processes is thanks to the team at Servana. Their experienced, methodical and inclusive approach to DevOps has helped create a great environment for the team and our product.
Harin Vaghela, Product Owner, LVMH Digital
