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The Dilemma between Sales, Development and System Administration

Developers are an essential component and success factor for many companies that are concerned with the digitalization of their processes and markets. While in the conventional IT process chain the developers were still very much dependent on the system administrators, there is a strong trend today towards a transformation of these areas.Efforts are going in the direction of an emancipation of the developers with regard to the use of the actual infrastructure components. In the past, many teams of developers had to wait for the provision of basic components (compute, network, storage, runtimes & libraries) and were thus slowed down or even hindered in their work.

At the same time, the general production and development cycles shortened and product owners, marketing, sales, etc. insisted on a faster time to market.

Also heavily affected by these general changes are the system administrators, who today have to operate platforms that change more frequently due to regular deployments, have to scale better due to the larger user base, and in addition have to be available around the clock.

If you analyze these at first glance contradictory requirements of the different interest groups, you will find that new paradigms have to be created that meet these requirements. These can be summarized roughly as follows:

Sales/marketing: fast time to market, agility in terms of requirements

Developer: flexible and immediate availability of basic components and services

System Administrator: Scalability, reliability and encapsulated software solutions that can be maintained and serviced without side effects

In the course of the last few years, the power of innovation in IT has led to the creation of solutions that meet these requirements. However, they can only develop their full potential with a significant paradigm shift and require rethinking in many areas.

In this blog post, we show from a developer's perspective how the SUSE Cloud Application Platform solves the developer/sysadmin/sales dilemma.

What problems does SUSE Cloud Application Platform solve?

The most commonly used solutions to meet the new requirements today are based on the insights Google gained from the Borg project and subsequently released as an independent open source project called Kubernetes.Kubernetes is one of several middlewares that can orchestrate containers. Orchestration refers to the approach of letting Kubernetes decide how a desired status - such as the number of instances of a particular container - is to be achieved. The fact that the orchestrator determines this dynamically depending on the load and health aspects of the running instances results in a completely different operational approach that sets different accents and focuses than would traditionally be the case. Containers themselves are much lighter than traditional VMs, and therefore use resources much more efficiently and can be deployed and maintained with less effort.

There are now a wide variety of Kubernetes offerings on the market, but the SUSE stack is attracting a lot of attention, especially due to the seamless integration of the Cloud Foundry components.

SUSE Cloud Application Platform (SUSE CAP) combines with Kubernetes on the one hand a solution for orchestrating/managing containers and with the Cloud Foundry integration on the other hand a highly efficient working environment for developers.

The combined technology stack solves the developer/sysadmin/sales dilemma as follows:

• Containers: using Kubernetes and CRI-O (or optional dockers), SUSE Cloud Application Platform implements a container environment that allows applications to run in their own encapsulated form. This opens up new ways to maintain, scale, and improve availability
  • Kubernetes can reinitiate containers within fractions of a second in case of an error
  • Rollback to the old status in case of a failed deployment is easily possible
  • Updating a runtime or a library has no side effects on other containers
  • Provisioning of compute, network and storage can be triggered independently by the developer, thus reducing the dependency on the system administrators
  • Better use of existing compute resources
• Cloud Foundry: by integrating Cloud Foundry with SUSE Cloud Application Platform, a working environment is created that makes the DevOps model very easy to implement. Developers can easily deploy code into the container environment and, by automating all the surrounding systems, can create a coherent process chain (pipeline) that minimizes the time to market for new solutions or customizations.

In the this blog post for developers, we take a closer look at how the individual components can be classified and how you can use them to deploy your first simple project.

To the technical Post

Soon we'll share deeper insights on how your company can profit form SUSE CaaSP und CAP - stay tuned!

About Adfinis and Cloudical

Adfinis and Cloudical combine not only technical excellence, but also the need to understand new technologies as quickly as possible in order to support their customers during their introduction. Cloudical and Adfinis are independent companies, but belong to the exclusive circle of SUSE Platinum Partners. In the past, they have already launched various projects together to report on the innovative solutions from SUSE. While Adfinis is based in Switzerland and the Netherlands, Cloudical covers Germany and Poland. Adfinis and Cloudical wish you a lot of fun and an educational adventure with our blog series. For further information please do not hesitate to contact us.