Doing DevOps in the Hybrid Multicloud World

A hybrid approach to DevOps can help accelerate digital transformation, but organizations need the right infrastructure to support it

Yogesh Malik
Doing DevOps in the Hybrid Multicloud World

There was once a time when a music company was just a music company, a car company was just a car company, and a bank was just a bank. Now, things have changed. We’ve seen how the music industry has transformed—from physical disks to MP3 files to a streaming subscription model. In short, music companies have become software companies. This is just one example of a trend that’s playing out across industry verticals.

Companies that make software the heart of their operations put themselves in the best position to achieve their business goals and thrive in the modern competitive landscape. The 2023 Global Interconnection Index (GXI), an annual market study published by Equinix, provides benchmark data that shows what this software-first shift looks like in practice. The GXI predicts that by 2025, 90% of Fortune 500 companies will become digital providers, both consuming digital services from business partners and selling digital services to end customers.

Just think of Tesla: Its business model is not to beat competitors with a better car, but to beat them with superior software. The average new car contains about 100 million lines of code[1], plus multiple individual computers and a vast number of wireless connections to internal and external communication channels. For this reason, it only makes sense that Tesla and other auto manufacturers see writing better code as a vital step toward creating a better car.

However, any would-be digital enterprise must be able to align the business with IT and define a digital transformation strategy that’s sustainable in today’s continuously changing market. The biggest challenge they’ll face when doing this is figuring out how to deliver software at the speed the business wants, and not at the speed application developers and IT operations teams can deliver. DevOps has helped many organizations overcome this challenge.

Integrate, Automate and Innovate on Platform Equinix

Accelerate your digital transformation.

Download Guide
Integrate, Automate and Innovate on Platform Equinix

How DevOps and hybrid multicloud support digital transformation

Over the last decade, DevOps has fundamentally changed how software gets built. Organizations have incorporated new practices and undergone tremendous transformations to shorten their software development lifecycle and stay competitive. The rise of DevOps and software-defined methods is helping businesses deliver new IT services and applications with maximum agility and flexibility.

At the same time, hybrid multicloud has become the IT architecture of choice for many organizations. Companies are choosing hybrid multicloud because it helps them capitalize on best-of-breed services from different vendors, avoid the hidden costs of cloud and ensure they can adapt to whatever the future may hold.

Hybrid deployments allow organizations to perform different parts of a software build on different platforms. This may be vital for security requirements, resource allocation and other optimizations. For example, an organization can use a highly scalable public cloud environment for its platform testing needs, while building its sensitive code in a more secure private cloud environment. Additionally, organizations can perform multiple software builds parallel to one another, thus helping them accelerate the build process and reduce overall workflow execution time.

DevOps on hybrid multicloud provides a very promising model for any large enterprise looking to jump-start its digital transformation. These enterprises are facing disruptive competition from new market entrants, and traditional software development methods simply aren’t fast or efficient enough to keep those competitors at bay. DevOps for hybrid multicloud can shorten time to market, support automation, reduce risk and waste, and connect tools, people, and processes across the end-to-end software development lifecycle.

Companies must evaluate their deployment needs and choose the right mix of flexible digital infrastructure to support DevOps in a hybrid multicloud environment, from public and private clouds to data centers at the digital edge.

Digital services from Equinix support DevOps in hybrid deployments

Equinix offers a variety of digital services to support hybrid DevOps deployments. In addition, API integration and support for container technologies help make those services quicker and easier to use.

Equinix Fabric™, our software-defined interconnection solution, helps customers quickly create the connections needed to bring different environments together securely. Customers can also simplify and automate interconnection provisioning using the Equinix Fabric API. One new capability included in the latest release of the Equinix Fabric API is support for partial resource updates. This means that customers can resize or update virtual connections within their hybrid deployment without having to rebuild the entire resource.

Equinix Metal® is our automated, interconnected Bare Metal as a Service offering. It makes it quick and simple for customers to set up dedicated compute and storage capacity on demand. Customers can also use APIs to scale their environment up and down, thus delivering the right amount of bare metal capacity at the right time. One recent example of this is when the global network carrier Orange took advantage of Equinix Metal API integration to deploy telco cloud PoPs in weeks, not months. This included integration of its DevOps and security automation tooling.

Finally, customers can use Network Edge for virtual network function (VNF) devices from top vendors. They can deploy virtual firewalls, multicloud routers, SD-WAN gateways and more, all while reducing CAPEX spend, speeding deployment and overcoming global hardware shortages. APIs and Terraform templates help our customers automate deployment of those virtual devices, thus granting them the agility and flexibility they need to do DevOps in an always-changing world.

Accelerate your digital transformation with the right infrastructure for your DevOps needs

Using digital services on Platform Equinix®, organizations can tap into multiple ecosystems of DevOps vendors or create their own ecosystem of application services by leveraging APIs and container technologies. By deploying at multiple cloud service providers, they can avoid vendor lock-in and remain future-proof and resilient.

To learn more about how Equinix APIs help provide the infrastructure agility needed for DevOps in hybrid environments, read the guide to Platform Equinix APIs.

 

 

[1] Hans Greimel, “Automakers rush to take back their software codes,” Automotive News, October 12, 2020.

Subscribe to the Equinix Blog