AWS has been in the news recently with the announcement of its newly selected CEO, Adam Selipsky, succeeding the previous CEO Andy Jassy, who will be taking the top seat at Amazon.
AWS is a longtime partner of Quali, and we are excited to be a Platinum sponsor of the AWS AMER 2021 virtual summit on May 12-13th. Let's take a look at what problems the Quali approach can solve for AWS customers, and why it matters now more than ever.
AWS offers hundreds of services, and the list is growing. One could think that these cover the entire spectrum of needs for any business adopting cloud technologies.
Despite this breadth of coverage, companies moving to AWS are still facing many challenges to fully embrace cloud technology.
Companies moving to AWS still facing many challenges to fully embrace cloud technology.
One of the first aspects is complexity. Many companies face challenges when growing their cloud adoption, due to the vast array of choices and the level of expertise required. Creating cloud infrastructure templates requires expert knowledge. These experts have to be hired, trained, and retained.
The reliance on a few key technical experts eventually creates a bottleneck in the organization. Developers need quick access to environments to perform their application development and testing and may rely on a ticketing system with long wait times.
The possible outcome of the previous point is to manage cloud resource consumption at the team or individual developer level. As a result, there is little oversight regarding alignment to company standards and best practices. This siloed approach results in possible security breaches and out-of-compliance issues during IT audits.
The final challenge is around cost management and control. When each developer spins up their own environments as needed, there is little oversight on terminating the environments when the resources are no longer needed. This can result in higher than necessary cloud budgets, and difficulty in predicting investments for IT management.
Benefits of Quali's infrastructure automation approach for companies using AWS
Quali's SaaS platform, Colony, removes the complexity from the equation for DevOps engineers, by using an application-first approach, and full automation in the back end ("low code" approach).
Colony provides a full self-service experience for developers, delivering environments on demand as soon as they are needed. Once companies reach a certain level of maturity, API driven flows are also supported all the way to production with CI/CD workflow integration.
It also enables governance through standard blueprints and a centralized allocation of cloud consumption driven by user-based policies. That way, the IT team has the means to enforce their security and compliance standards without becoming a bottleneck.
Additionally, Colony enables businesses to control cloud costs through automated environment termination to ensure cloud resources are only consumed for the time they are truly needed. A comprehensive dashboard provides a clear picture for the IT manager to link cloud spending to application team and development efforts. Additionally, trending reports offer a glimpse into the future to help predict and budget cloud spend.
Colony has already helped a variety of customers achieve these goals as part of their digital transformation journey to the cloud: from large companies in the tech sector, to medium size retail outlets.
Enabling faster time to value for AWS customers through the marketplace
The AWS marketplace offers AWS customers a simple way to transact and purchase licensed software products that complements the AWS offering. Last year, Quali launched its participation in the AWS marketplace with private offers available for customers who need specific contract terms but still want to take advantage of their AWS enterprise discount prices to budget their DevOps investments.
We are also participating in a beta program to enhance the consumption of the Colony 30-day free trial through the marketplace. Make sure you check this new experience if you visit the marketplace.
As I mentioned in the introduction, Quali is a Platinum sponsor of the upcoming AWS AMERICAs summit on May 12-13, 2021. Expect to hear from Peter DeSantis, SVP of AWS Global Infrastructure and Customer Support, and special guest Dorothy Li, VP of AWS BI and Analytics about strategy and discover some cool educational videos at our virtual booth! Registration for the Summit is now live; you can register by clicking the button below.
