The need for dynamic environments is disrupting effective DevOps. As the “role of IT changes to that of a service orchestrator as opposed to that of a service provider” (Gartner, November 2019), choosing end-user enablement tools that support administration and governance is key to DevOps at scale. With your teams adopting hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure to support your business-critical applications, you need a way to monitor usage, gain security, and control cloud expenses. To gain control of cloud costs, businesses look to two possible solutions, Cloud Management Platforms (CMP) or Environment as a Service (EaaS) solutions.
In its simplest form, a CMP helps IT teams optimize and manage cloud infrastructure for cost, security, and operations. And an EaaS solution makes it possible for teams to get access to cloud-agnostic dynamic environments through a self-service portal, while making it possible for IT Ops to govern access, cost and security.
While CMPs and EaaS solutions both provide a governance engine to enable cost control, security and compliance, there are multiple differences between the two solutions. This post highlights just a few of the differences between the two.
3 Major Differences Between CMP and EaaS
Environment-type
Due to its limitations and its focus on inventory-based infrastructure, CMPs are ideal for environments that don’t often change. With CMPs once resources are inventoried and classified, it is possible to apply policies, monitor changes, and manage their configurations.
However, as you drive your digital transformation by adopting DevOps practices, environments become more dynamic and the frequent changes make it harder to manage in traditional ways. EaaS solutions are built for dynamic environments and harness automation for achieving control. As your DevOps adoption matures, the need for dynamic environments grows.
User Access
CMPs provide your IT teams with centralized control over your infrastructure. But, with DevOps adoption, the demand for a more agile and flexible solution that aligns to business requirements becomes essential.
Leveraging blueprints, EaaS solutions offer an end-user-centric approach to environment access that supports the cultural changes brought on by DevOps, without IT teams sacrificing control. Blueprints are made of modular building blocks that make it possible for users with various skill levels to access infrastructure on-demand while focusing on the business need.
With modularized blueprints from an EaaS solution, you can provide accessible automation to standardized environments that speaks the language of the business, without requiring end-users to be an infrastructure expert.
Focus
Another differences between a CMP and an EaaS solution is what they focus on in your application model. CMPs place focus on the infrastructure layer and orchestrates provisioning based on infrastructure inventory. So, when a piece of infrastructure changes, the application must change with it.
Rooted in the application model and business need, an EaaS solution focuses on the business need. With an EaaS solution you can create blueprints of the infrastructure, applications, and data components together to allow repeatable orchestration of environments for multiple tasks, service multiple teams.
As new technology is added and the infrastructure becomes more transparent and abstracted, blueprints make it easy to expand the automation and provide a single pane of glass view into your lines of business.
Conclusion
While CMPs give your IT teams control of the cloud, they create bottlenecks as Dev and Test teams request access for production-like environments, delaying innovation. EaaS solutions provide your IT teams with the ability to control cloud expenses while accelerating innovation by giving your Dev and Test teams secure, self-service access to the environments on-demand.
For more tips on scaling DevOps, download our “Buyer’s Guide To Scaling DevOps.”
