Purpose

Companies are providing various services that are deployed on a cloud platform. These services are the backbone of the infrastructure, any glitch in services will affect the user experience. It is necessary to deploy, maintain and monitor these services smoothly. Maintenance and monitoring always have high overheads that is why DevOps plays an important role in provisioning these services.

DevOps traditionally runs custom-built scripts to provision the service and the infrastructure required. Bespoke scripts are more automated to a service layer, such as the Web service layer but leave out infrastructure.

IT teams must review whether automating ad hoc workloads has any time-reduction benefits beyond just giving basic access for app/dev teams to manually install components and apps.

Let us imagine a scenario - a software developer needed to set up a test environment for an enterprise IT project. The developer filed a ticket with the IT department, listing the resources required, such as a virtual machine with a certain operating system and system tools installed. Developers have to justify the resources and wait for the capacity to free up from some other project; wait for someone in IT to implement specified configuration, and troubleshoot it if configured wrong. Finally, days or even weeks later, the developer has an environment ready for testing. This is inefficient and time-consuming.

One practical benefit of cloud computing and DevOps is the emergence of self-service provisioning (sometimes called automated provisioning), whereby tech-savvy users (such as developers) set up or launch a service or application without active participation of dedicated IT personnel. The requested services are provided in an accurate configuration and on an accelerated timeline. They are bound by IT's policies but without IT's manual intervention.

The main advantage of automated provisioning in the cloud is automation, predictability, and speed of preparing a resource for an internal or external customer. In this way, exposing and allocating cloud computing resources makes life easier for the developer, enables faster results for application owners, maintains compliance and security protocols, and gives more predictable automation to IT staff.

Proper role-based management should be in place so that unauthorized users could gain access to IT resources and wreak havoc on applications and data.

New service access and operational security should be integrated with existing security to make sure different ongoing infrastructure operations are secure and resilient.

Easy-to-use self-service marketplace portal that lets users/developers publish, consume, and manage a full range of infrastructure services with service customization.

Implement proper workflows and permission and choose the right tools (not only the single vendor whose partner program for which the vendor signed up) and knows those tools inside and out.