8CIOReview | | JUNE 2023By Henry Gao, Continuous Delivery Manager (Head of DevOps), ING AustraliaMany CIOs would put `Cloud-first' as one of their most critical strategy. It is an approach to cloud computing that involves the adoption of cloud technologies for all new applications, platforms and infrastructure, a strategy that prioritizes cloud computing services over legacy IT systems. Australia's big four banks claimed that more than 70% of their computing workload is on public cloud. However, all of them still have to schedule "customer down time release". So what can be the common challenges for them?One big missing pillar here could be Automation! 'Automation' is not the same thing as 'building things yourself when you can buy off the shelf', Automation is something like putting things that you buy together to become something unique that gives the business competitive advantage.Automate Infrastructure, automate platform, automate your full application stack's release process and automate security. By putting them together, you create the unique business competitive advantage! Following examples are the patterns that you can adopt in your infrastructure, application and database automation design.Infrastructure Automation design: The starting point is Infrastructure, it is your foundation. This can help you achieve two major business goals: 1. The DR (disaster recovery) solution. If you can rebuild your full infrastructure automatically in a short time, you are close to achieving your DR target. 2. Infrastructure automation is the foundation for you to achieve Zero day vulnerability. Furthermore, adopt immutable infrastructure pattern in the enterprise application design. This is a model in which no updates, security patches, or configuration changes happen "in-place" on production systems.This example uses Terraform to automate your AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service):You have AKS Prod cluster 1 as your running production. When you need to update or patch your AKS platform, you create AKS Prod cluster 2. Redeploy all applications on cluster 2 and switch your cluster 2 as running production. Development environment is designed the same way so there's no down time for developers when you update development platform.IN MY OPINIONIN MY OPINIONCLOUD-FIRST OR AUTOMATION FIRST?Henry Gao
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