| | December 20168CIOReviewIN MY OPINIONStandardizing, Maintaining, and Scaling OpenStack adoptionSteve Brodie, CEO, Electric CloudConsidering OpenStack? As more and more enterprises move to the cloud, many companies are looking to OpenStack to reduce data center costs and increase technology efficiency. One of the key benefits of OpenStack and other cloud infrastructure is providing teams the ability to speed the development and deployment of business applications. Yet due to the maturity of the current OpenStack landscape, some enterprises are finding it difficult either standardizing on OpenStack or maintaining and scaling OpenStack adoption. Many IT organizations are learning quickly that:· It is increasingly difficult to understand how, where and when to leverage public or private cloud computing within the enterprise. Having this background knowledge is crucial to building an effective strategy for leveraging one of the industry's most disruptive technology trends.· To gain maximum value, OpenStack must be viewed and used as just one flavor within a highly federated and hybrid infrastructure. Most enterprise cloud environments include a mix of different technical solutions designed to address specific and different needs. · IT leadershipmust consider their cloud infrastructure across many different veins; tools to give their development and operations teams a common platform to collaborate, the ability for regulation and compliance factors to be met, and what overall infrastructure is appropriate for specific product/services the company is bringing to market. So what are the top considerations for leveraging OpenStack as part of your software delivery pipeline?To support future scalability, teams need to architect for flexibility to accommodate complex software delivery pipelines, and extensibility to different technology stacks. In general, you want assurance that the processes and tools that power your Application Release are agnostic of your cloud/stack. You need to ensure that you're able to deploy any artifact, to any environment, be it OpenStack, or not--without the need to reconstruct your processes or code. As your application or architecture evolves, the code that your organization produces may find itself--throughout its lifecycle--deployed to different environments and stacks (either across Dev, Test, Staging, Prod; or you may want to migrate your application from one cloud to another, and so on.) In addition, remember that a lot happens to your code before it is finally deployed to the `Last Mile' in Production, and that dozens of point tools are involved as part of your software delivery process--from code check-in all the way to Production. To accelerate your pipeline and support better manageability of the entire process, you want a platform that can serve as a layer above any infrastructure or specific tools/technology and enable centralized management and orchestration of all your tool chain, environments and apps. With the complex releases for today's enterprise apps, you want to have visibility into the entire path leading up to the Release. This not only speeds up your release process, mitigates risk and eliminates manual handoffs that are error prone--but also serves as your audit trail. When you can manage and automatically track the entire path every artifact takes as part of the Release, including all related processes and environments (who approved deployment of which bits to which server), this effectively ensure compliance. By
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