A key trend in the cloud-native space today is to automate and abstract underlying infrastructure in order to ease the process of building code, thus giving developers their time back. This is the idea behind ZeroOps – a way to automate everything about infrastructure that can be automated. It reduces manual tasks, adds in automation at every step, and does not compromise on performance. This seems like the best of all worlds for cloud-native architects. Let’s dive a little deeper into how this is done and better understand the concept of ZeroOps as practiced by one startup in particular – amazee.io.
amazee.io’s ZeroOps
ZeroOps is essentially a set of practices that enable developers to focus completely on coding by eliminating the time spent on infrastructure management. For Ops teams or Platform teams, the benefit is that they get to have more control over infrastructure provisioning and can focus on improving the developer experience strategically.
Most web applications are multiple services that require various things like databases, networking, memory and compute resources, etc. Amazee.io focuses on providing all of those services in a streamlined way. It provides developers with a local development solution so they can spin up their website, stand their code up and confirm that the configuration they have just updated for a particular site looks exactly as it should. This helps replicate that local result into production. So, all the developer has to do is push a piece of code in the form of a commit. The application delivery platform will then read that Git commit and Amazee.io can push it into production automatically.
ZeroOps allows developers to take the friction out of building applications. It frees up operations teams from spending all their time doing infrastructure plumbing for Kubernetes clusters. This way, the two teams operate in their individual spaces with their expertise and focus on their particular goals without having to cross skill.
From a developer’s point of view, ZeroOps allows them to push code, monitor the status of their builds, and see the outcomes without them having to worry about how to optimize and fine-tune Kubernetes or virtual machine settings. Developers no longer need to worry about how to set scaling parameters, deal with resource allocations, optimize ingress, etc. They can focus solely on improving their productivity.
amazee.io believes that the “local to production” workflow is significant. They work closely with developers to make sure that their website works in Docker compose. This is probably one of the most important steps in the whole process.
Most of the native Kubernetes solutions these days live entirely in Kubernetes and therefore require people to have fullstack skills. When it comes to amazee.io, all a developer needs to do is learn how Docker compose works. If a Docker compose stack works, there’s a fairly good chance Amazee.io can make that work in Kubernetes. Once a developer has got a Docker compose deck, amazee.io can set them up with a plan to host their site to go through developments.
Lagoon
Lagoon is an open-source, cloud-native platform created by Amazee.io. It can deploy, manage, and secure the operation of applications thus decreasing the load on developers when it comes to dealing with infrastructure. Lagoon lives on top of Kubernetes and has two components – Lagoon Remote and Lagoon Core that can be installed on any conformant Kubernetes cluster. Lagoon Remote handles the actual web applications side of things and Lagoon Core helps with orchestration. It is one of the easiest ways that enables developers to take advantage of the latest cloud services without being a Kubernetes expert.
The approach to Kubernetes
When you look at the DevOps ecosystem and other products in the application delivery platform category, a lot of them come at it as developing and deploying applications for Kubernetes. With Amazee.io, the focus is to assume that application developers have no Kubernetes knowledge, but should still be able to deploy the apps they build into secure and reliable Kubernetes clusters.
A lot of the solutions out there are particularly targeted toward single apps. But on a large scale and when looking at a large web property, there can be 25 different services interacting together. This becomes quite a bit of a hassle. With Amazee.io, a project can go from Git repository to first site in under three minutes and fairly consistently. This is done without the developer having to do anything other than have a Git repo. So, amazee.io really prides themselves in taking the application developer angle on this rather than the Kubernetes engineer angle and making the life of someone who isn’t particularly skilled with Kubernetes much easier.
Wrapping up
Organizations need to start providing their developers with platforms that actually help them get things done instead of hogging their time. ZeroOps enables organizations to take advantage of the resources they already have and allow their developers to do what they were hired to do and what they do best. It essentially provides a much needed balance between automation and cloud-native expertise. amazee.io wants their users to be confident about the fact that what they see in the Dev test environment is the same as what they saw on their local by eliminating any and all hassle and worry.
If you have questions related to this topic, feel free to book a meeting with one of our solutions experts, mail to sales@amazic.com.