Auto­ma­tion as a fun­da­mental build­ing block for cloud–native transformation

As part of the synvert mis­sion of cre­at­ing high-per­form­ing organ­iz­a­tions, we see auto­ma­tion as a crit­ical build­ing block.

Auto­ma­tion is all about adding tech­no­logy that per­forms tasks with reduced human assist­ance. It offers numer­ous bene­fits to organ­iz­a­tions, includ­ing increased speed, scalab­il­ity, secur­ity, time-to-mar­ket, man­age­ment effi­ciency, agnosti­cism, qual­ity improve­ment, and sys­tem avail­ab­il­ity. All these advant­ages con­trib­ute to oper­a­tional excel­lence, cost-effect­ive­ness, com­pet­it­ive­ness, and over­all cus­tomer satisfaction.

In this art­icle, our goal is to go one lever deeper going from the­ory to prac­tice on what exactly we pri­or­it­ize auto­mat­ing in a Cloud Nat­ive setup with our cus­tom­ers. In the second sec­tion of this art­icle, we give you insights into how we did it with a real-world example for a cus­tomer that needed to avoid cloud vendor lock-in, lever­aging open-source tools as much as possible.

What auto­ma­tion do we pri­or­it­ize at synvert?

The pri­or­it­iz­a­tion regard­ing auto­mat­ing pro­cesses can vary depend­ing on an organization’s spe­cific needs, goals, and matur­ity. How­ever, some com­mon pro­cesses that advise teams to pri­or­it­ize and help imple­ment are:

1. Test­ing

Auto­mat­ing vari­ous types of test­ing, such as unit test­ing, integ­ra­tion test­ing, and accept­ance test­ing, helps us speed up the test­ing pro­cess and improve the qual­ity of releases. We see that over time, our lead time for change decreases to less than half the time and we’re able to deploy twice as much and more reli­ably com­pared to sim­ilar pro­jects with no auto­mated test­ing in place.

2. Con­tinu­ous Integ­ra­tion and Con­tinu­ous Deploy­ment (CI/CD)

Auto­mat­ing build, test, and deploy­ment pro­cesses is a cru­cial com­pon­ent of a cloud-nat­ive setup, enabling organ­iz­a­tions to deliver their products and ser­vices faster and more frequently.

At synvert, we rely on tools like Git­Hub Actions or Git­lab CI for our CI/CD require­ments and pri­or­it­ize agnostic prac­tices to ensure scalab­il­ity in the face of growth.

3. Infra­struc­ture as Code (IaC)

We advoc­ate for adopt­ing Infra­struc­ture as Code (IaC) prac­tices to auto­mate the pro­vi­sion­ing and man­age­ment of infra­struc­ture, which can improve effi­ciency and reduce the risk of errors. IaC also enables bet­ter cost man­age­ment by provid­ing an over­view of all resources used by applic­a­tions and ser­vices. We emphas­ize the import­ance of describ­ing all resources in our IaC to pre­vent the cre­ation of unused resources and reduce unne­ces­sary expenses.

4. Con­fig­ur­a­tion as Code

Auto­ma­tion com­bined with con­fig­ur­a­tion as code prac­tices can bring sig­ni­fic­ant bene­fits to organ­iz­a­tions. By auto­mat­ing infra­struc­ture and sys­tem con­fig­ur­a­tions, it is pos­sible to improve con­sist­ency, speed, and accur­acy while redu­cing the risk of errors.

At synvert, we value the use of con­fig­ur­a­tion as code and auto­ma­tion as a way to improve effi­ciency and reduce costs. Addi­tion­ally, it enhances col­lab­or­a­tion, secur­ity, and trace­ab­il­ity, which are cru­cial factors in a cloud-nat­ive environment.

5. Mon­it­or­ing and Logging

Auto­mated mon­it­or­ing and log­ging play a cru­cial role in enabling organ­iz­a­tions to swiftly detect and troubleshoot issues, lead­ing to improved avail­ab­il­ity and reli­ab­il­ity of their applic­a­tions and infra­struc­ture. We take this a step fur­ther by set­ting up alert­ing and integ­rat­ing mul­tiple com­mu­nic­a­tion tools to ensure that we are imme­di­ately noti­fied when any alert is triggered, allow­ing us to take prompt action and pre­vent any pos­sible down­time or issues.

6. Data backup and recovery

Data backup and recov­ery is a crit­ical part of any organization’s dis­aster recov­ery plan. In the event of a data loss, hav­ing a com­pre­hens­ive backup sys­tem in place can mean the dif­fer­ence between quickly recov­er­ing from the loss and exper­i­en­cing costly down­time. Auto­mated data backup sys­tems can help organ­iz­a­tions ensure that crit­ical data is backed up reg­u­larly, securely, and effi­ciently. Cloud-based backup solu­tions offer added pro­tec­tion by stor­ing backups off-site, away from the organization’s primary infrastructure.

At synvert, we under­stand the import­ance of data backup and recov­ery and work with our cli­ents to develop and imple­ment robust backup and recov­ery strategies tailored to their spe­cific needs. We pri­or­it­ize secur­ity, redund­ancy, and ease of use to ensure that our cli­ents can quickly recover from any data loss or sys­tem failure.

7. Secur­ity

Auto­mat­ing secur­ity pro­cesses can strengthen an organization’s secur­ity pos­ture, mit­ig­ate the risk of secur­ity incid­ents, and exped­ite its response to secur­ity threats. It is imper­at­ive for organ­iz­a­tions to pri­or­it­ize secur­ity in their auto­ma­tion efforts and ensure that secur­ity is integ­rated into all facets of their oper­a­tions to safe­guard sens­it­ive data from pos­sible breaches.

At synvert, some com­mon examples are the incor­por­a­tion of tools that exam­ine the code, con­tainer images, and IaC for any secur­ity breaches and aid us in main­tain­ing the defined secur­ity pos­ture on every pro­ject we undertake.

8. Report­ing and analytics

Auto­mat­ing the report and ana­lyt­ics gen­er­a­tion pro­cess can offer valu­able real-time insights into crit­ical per­form­ance met­rics, empower­ing organ­iz­a­tions to make informed, data-driven decisions. We pri­or­it­ize ensur­ing that we have accur­ate and com­pre­hens­ive reports with action­able data that can drive our pro­jects and improve busi­ness out­comes. This inform­a­tion is not only use­ful for our devel­op­ment team but also for our busi­ness lead­ers to make stra­tegic decisions.

Once again, auto­ma­tion offers numer­ous bene­fits to organ­iz­a­tions, includ­ing increased effi­ciency, faster time-to-mar­ket, improved qual­ity, enhanced secur­ity, bet­ter busi­ness man­age­ment, and reduced risk of errors. By auto­mat­ing tasks and pro­cesses, organ­iz­a­tions can stream­line their oper­a­tions, allow­ing for more informed decision-mak­ing and pro­mot­ing busi­ness growth.

How we did it in a real-world cloud-nat­ive transformation

To explain bet­ter the import­ance of auto­mated pro­cesses regard­ing cloud-nat­ive trans­form­a­tion we will use one of our cus­tom­er’s jour­neys as an example. In this spe­cific example, we had a very open-source approach, since the cus­tomer wanted to be cloud pro­vider agnostic.

In this par­tic­u­lar pro­ject, our team built a new cloud infra­struc­ture from the ground up. We iden­ti­fied a few oppor­tun­it­ies that could be auto­mated to sim­plify the deliv­ery pro­cess and stream­line the work of the engin­eer­ing teams. By auto­mat­ing these pro­cesses, we increased the Lead Time for Change and num­ber of deploy­ments drastically.

1. Auto­mat­ing the infra­struc­ture layer with IaaC

We defined the entire infra­struc­ture using Ter­ra­form. This allowed us to eas­ily pro­vi­sion our infra­struc­ture, from the net­work and Kuber­netes cluster to the load bal­an­cer and bey­ond, cre­at­ing an immut­able infra­struc­ture that was easy to man­age. Using this tool, we saved time and effort while ensur­ing the reli­ab­il­ity and con­sist­ency of our infra­struc­ture. To learn more about the bene­fits of immut­able and eph­em­eral infra­struc­ture, please refer to our art­icle on the sub­ject.

2. Auto­mat­ing the applic­a­tion runtime layer with Kubernetes

Once our infra­struc­ture was oper­a­tional, our focus shif­ted to deploy­ing and serving the cus­tom­ers applic­a­tions. To man­age our Kuber­netes applic­a­tions, we util­ized Helm charts, a pack­age man­ager that allowed us to con­fig­ure all the applic­a­tions with the neces­sary tem­plates for effi­cient deployment.

3. Auto­mat­ing the Release Pipeline

In terms of CI/CD, we have imple­men­ted spe­cific actions to ini­ti­ate cer­tain pro­ced­ures. Upon the developer’s sub­mis­sion of a pull request (PR) for mer­ging with the primary branch, a series of tasks are activ­ated. These tasks include run­ning unit tests, con­duct­ing secur­ity, code qual­ity, vul­ner­ab­il­ity checks, and more.

This ensures that any merged code will not cause any dis­rup­tions, main­tain its qual­ity, and com­ply with team stand­ards. After suc­cess­fully passing all pro­ced­ures, the pull request is deemed ready for mer­ging. Once the developer com­pletes the merge, the con­tinu­ous deploy­ment pro­cess is triggered. This pro­cess starts with the gen­er­a­tion of a con­tainer image, usu­ally done through Docker, fol­lowed by the pub­lic­a­tion of the image to a con­tainer registry. The deploy­ment pro­cess then starts, lever­aging the pre-exist­ing Helm charts configuration.

4. Auto­mat­ing observability

In terms of mon­it­or­ing, we used Pro­meth­eus, a widely-used open-source mon­it­or­ing sys­tem that fea­tures a flex­ible query lan­guage, an effi­cient time series data­base, and a mod­ern alert­ing approach. Pro­meth­eus col­lects our applic­a­tion met­rics, provid­ing us with valu­able insights into factors such as latency and down­time, and even scales auto­mat­ic­ally. For more inform­a­tion on best prac­tices related to this topic, we recom­mend read­ing our art­icle.

In this spe­cific sys­tem, there were two addi­tional tools, namely Grafana and Loki, which are part of the same eco­sys­tem as Pro­meth­eus. By util­iz­ing Pro­meth­eus as a data source, Grafana retrieves met­rics from it, allow­ing us to design dash­boards that track vari­ous aspects of our applic­a­tions, such as resource usage, latency, net­work band­width, and more.

Loki is employed as a source of data, col­lect­ing logs from the applic­a­tions, which can then be accessed through Grafana.

Final thoughts

At synvert, our approach to Cloud Nat­ive Trans­form­a­tion involves delving into the found­a­tional build­ing blocks that under­pin it. This uniquely pos­i­tions us to guide cus­tom­ers to think bey­ond the tools and focus on the pur­pose behind their endeavors.

In the scen­ario presen­ted, while lever­aging man­aged ser­vices from a pub­lic cloud pro­vider is often advant­age­ous, we assisted the cus­tomer in main­tain­ing agnosti­cism while still achiev­ing their ulti­mate goals. By pri­or­it­iz­ing the needs of their end users and fos­ter­ing a seam­less developer exper­i­ence, we facil­it­ated con­tinu­ous product devel­op­ment with a strong emphasis on qual­ity and speed!