Enterprises are moving their applications to the cloud for a wide variety of very good reasons: The cloud makes scaling applications easier. The cloud makes launching incremental data centers easier. The cloud saves money by allocating the proper resources to specific needs. The cloud encourages innovation by enabling companies to launch new capabilities faster and easier.
Lift-and-shift is only the beginning
But according to the IT organizations in more than 500 large and small enterprises across the United States and Europe surveyed by New Relic, “lifting and shifting” a few applications to the hybrid cloud is simply not enough to fully capture those benefits. (In a lift-and-shift, application teams simply replicate their in-house apps in the cloud with minimal re-architecting.)
As organizations get more experience with their cloud investments, however, they’re uncovering the key ingredients for cloud success: a heavy focus on leveraging the dynamic capabilities of the cloud combined with cultural transformation through DevOps. This ebook can help you learn from organizations that have successfully navigated the transition to the dynamic, multi-cloud world.
To find out how these benefits are playing out for real enterprises, our survey asked IT professionals to share how they are using the cloud today, how they are adapting their cultures to a cloud mentality, the cloud computing benefits they’re getting, and how they are monitoring their increasingly complex (and increasingly ephemeral) applications.
What we learned is that to take advantage of many of the most important benefits of cloud computing, you need to do more than simply move all or part of your application to cloud-based servers in a simple migration. And while maintaining some of your applications in the cloud and some of them in your own data centers (an approach often called the “hybrid cloud”) can be an effective part of a migration strategy, it is not a long-term solution to maximize the benefits of the cloud.
Dynamic cloud meets DevOps in a serverless world
The survey revealed that to take full advantage of cloud computing’s advantages, you must update your applications to use the dynamic capabilities of the cloud. Only then, survey respondents said, can you fully realize the scaling, resource allocation, and cost saving properties of the cloud.
Additionally, to truly exploit the dynamic cloud—leveraging containers and serverless architectures, or simply scalable EC2 clusters in environments where resources are much more nimble and ephemeral, allocated only when you need them—enterprises must evolve their company culture to thrive in a highly dynamic and constantly moving environment.
The best and most common way to do this—according to the survey—is to fully adopt DevOps methodologies. Embracing DevOps and the dynamic cloud in the context of a true organizational transformation may seem like a daunting challenge, but organizations all over the world are finding that adopting these dynamic methodologies significantly boosts their growth and innovation. Notably, the survey results suggest DevOps success requires a significant commitment—partial DevOps adoption might be not just ineffective, but actually counterproductive.
To learn more about how enterprises are using the cloud and how their experiences can inform your own cloud-migration strategies, this ebook will drill down into the survey’s three key findings:
- The dynamic cloud drives results
- DevOps and dynamic cloud make a powerful combination
- Performance monitoring is key to dynamic cloud success