The purpose of this Anthos whitepaper is to highlight the opportunities that Google’s Anthos, together with changes to team practices, make available to the African market to accelerate digital transformation and increase the global competitiveness of African enterprises.
Anthos is is Google’s highly anticipated answer to enterprise workload orchestration. The reality in enterprises today is a mix of hybrid and multi-cloud strategies. Organisations choose the best fit for their technology needs, using price, location, and vendor requirements as decision points.
Anthos gives the enterprise the power to:
- Modernise in place
- Automate policy and security at scale
- Future proof investments with an interface that provides consistency across platforms
Anthos is built on Kubernetes, the Google-backed, open-source industry leader in container orchestration and workload portability. Kubernetes is now globally considered the best way to design and orchestrate enterprise architecture while still maintaining platform portability. Anthos also supports a new way of delivery. Even as enterprises change the way they build their software, so they find themselves changing how they build teams.
The new devops team practices
Kubernetes and Anthos are accompanied and supported by a big change in the way teams structure themselves to achieve their goals within enterprise organisations. Historically, and as a result of companies finding themselves in new territories of growth and expansion in the past 50 odd years, we found that most enterprise organisations created teams and departments by grouping competency. This meant that teams generally were good at one thing (i.e. development, database administration or networking) and relied on a precarious chain of task handovers between different teams to deliver overall value to business.
While this approach worked well for task- based efficiencies, knowledge management and depth of skills, it created the now famous multi-VP problem and considerably slowed down delivery of business value.
Devops is a paradigm that uses Conway’s Law to address these organisational issues. It empowers teams to deliver value with a reduction of dependencies on other teams. This means that the team will, in most cases, not depend upon any other team to deliver value and can truly say “The buck stops with
us!”
DevOps teams are made up of all the people, processes, tools and skills needed to design, deliver and maintain an enterprise business solution in the live environment.
The transition to this type of team is supported by innovative tooling such as the GCP console and its box of tools (Anthos and other cloud-based managed services) that abstract and encapsulate the architectural complexity inherent in IT solutions.
Adoption of DevOps practices has been shown to increase development velocity while also materially increasing solution stability. This puts businesses in a position to keep the nimbleness of startups while still achieving the scale of enterprise operations.
The leapfrog
It is the position of this paper that if African enterprises use Google’s Anthos solution and modernised team practices to service Africa’s service gap, Africa’s enterprises can create better service architectures that help it leapfrog global competitors.
Early data on the return on investment (ROI) realised by implementing Anthos is incredibly promising, as detailed in a recent Forrester Total Economic Impact report on Anthos, but these results speak to European and North American markets where IT Systems and Processes were already entrenched and in need of
modernisation.
The process of taking entrenched, collocated systems and teams into this new distributed, DevOps style of work is often prohibitive in terms of both time and cost. Markets that are free of these entrenched systems and costs have a marked advantage over competitors and can, by using the modern tools and methods detailed ahead, use this advantage to competitively grow their market share.
African markets are an example of just such an opportunity. With the exception of a few outliers, corporations in Africa are at a nascent stage of IT development and are not heavily invested in existing systems and processes. African markets are therefore well positioned to take advantage of new technical tooling and modern team practises.
Cost curves and better teams
As of this writing, Google has announced Anthos’s general availability on AWS and that availability on Azure is in user testing. With that, Anthos will present African enterprises with the ability to coordinate workloads across different cloud platforms and on-premise, allowing true flexibility to leverage the best qualities of each cloud platform while managing costs and overhead through a standard interface. Operating such an enterprise service network, with attendant interdependencies and critical chains of execution, requires DevOps teams that have the bigger picture of the architecture. DevOps teams that take responsibility for all these concerns are sometimes said to be practising DevSecRegOps. DevSecRegOps puts security and regulatory concerns on equal footing with development and operational concerns. DevSecRegOps teams can leverage Anthos to run an arbitrarily scalable development, security and regulatory operations shop in these ways:
Development
As we better understand microservices and the individual volatilities they encapsulate, the architectures microservices are deployed to begin to take center stage. Evolving architectures are putting ever more well encapsulated services into their own self managing Kubernetes pods which create value by interacting with other related pods. Anthos uses KNative to enable this paradigm shift for developers and has them thinking clearly about where the code runs and thus writing better APIs. With cloud architectures, the pipeline from code change to production deployment can now be automated by developers themselves.
Regulations
As industry regulators come up with ever more rules and regulations that must be adhered to in order to maintain business licenses, the ability to quickly comply is a key competency for any team. Unmet, regulatory requirements can derail delivery of value. Meeting regulatory requirements can often mean running sensitive workloads locally because of data sovereignty regulations or it can mean providing an audit log across multiple sub-systems. Anthos allows you to have all the flexibility of cloud architectures on your local servers while keeping an audit log across all systems under management. With Anthos On-premise, part of your cloud workload can be deployed to on-premise servers yet still be integrated and managed as part of the larger multi- cloud environment. This is but one example of how Anthos can be used to meet regulatory requirements without resorting to outdated architectures.
Security
As an ever present concern with moving goal posts and black swan breach events lurking around every corner, security requires a clear, enterprise-level strategy. Many enterprises found themselves compromised through an ad hoc piece of architecture that broke security protocols. Anthos, using Istio’s service mesh, encodes security protocols and policies for each server interaction and allows teams of teams to apply them consistently across sub-architectures. This makes it much harder for malicious behaviours to propagate beyond their point of entry, should they gain purchase. Breaches are corralled and contained in this manner.
Operations
Operations is the engine of delivery behind every solution. Enabling enterprise IT operations is the not-so-secret Anthos mission. In this way, it might be likened to an operating system for your enterprise architecture. Like an operating system, it presents a useful set of easy to use services and automates and abstracts away underlying complexities and volatilities.
A key metric in scaling enterprise solutions is the operational cost of making development, security and regulatory changes. Unmonitored and unmanaged, the cost of making changes can begin to balloon and turn software assets into liabilities. This is one of the main hurdles for modern enterprise architectures to overcome. With Anthos, they have a tool designed specifically for the job of supporting them as they manage their cost of change curve.
Flattening the cost of change curve
The cost of running an IT infrastructure and codebase grows exponentially with the number of integrated production services deployed. This has been borne out by countless experiences reported by Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) and Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) that watched their IT investments go from key business enablers to an ever growing cost centre and, finally, to a liability.
This traditional IT cost curve is the driver behind various innovations such as the move to cloud computing and agile practices. The big idea behind these new processes and technologies is to “flatten the curve” of costs associated with running IT systems at scale.
The following diagram is an extrapolated model based on Kent Beck’s Cost of Change theory where he illustrated his projection of the cost savings that can be realised by agile practices. It is a similar idealisation that replaces agile practices with DevOps practices and the Anthos multi-cloud platform. It also replaces time on the x axis with the number of deployed production services.
As shown in the diagram, DevOps team strategies and Anthos’s multi-cloud plus hybrid infrastructure platform have the direct aim of ensuring that IT remains an agile and cost efficient enabler, never becoming a cost center nor a liability. The most interesting thing about the modern cost curve is that the area under the curve is equal to that of the traditional cost curve, meaning that there is an increased investment required at project inception, which then ensures that costs remain manageable in the long run. This initial higher investment is what “flattens the curve” by putting in place the necessary infrastructure for later efficiencies. The right way to flatten the cost curve is to encapsulate change.
Encapsulating change
Juval Lowy is a well-known author, architect and speaker who has helped many organisations to think clearly about their enterprise software architecture. In his workshops he explains the dangers of functional decomposition (designing a system by it’s core use cases) as the basis for analysis and software design.
He lists reasons why functional decomposition has thwarted good architectural design for decades. He advocates that we instead use volatility-based decomposition which asks architects and developers to instead design systems by:
➔ identifying areas of potential change and encapsulating them in services that allow clients to be unaffected by the changes;
➔ implementing behavior as interactions between services or subsystems;
➔ creating delivery milestones based on service integration, not feature delivery; and
➔ assuming the domain is constant and thus avoiding cross-domain concerns.
This change-encapsulation approach is key for teams that wish to manage the cost of change over time.
DevOps as an approach to productivity requires a team that itself encapsulates changes for those who consume its services. Kubernetes as a choice of infrastructure platform gives a DevOps team the opportunity to encapsulate architectural change and present a consistent service. Anthos then allows you to orchestrate multiple Kubernetes implementations across multiple clouds.
The switch to volatility-based design using Kubernetes and Anthos has higher upfront investment. It requires time to tease out the volatilities of a new system and encapsulatethem in Kubernetes configurations and Anthos policies. But once these architectural volatilities are understood and encapsulated, therein lies the long term benefit of a system that is easy to maintain, evolve and pivot.
This upfront investment pattern is symptomatic of the explore, exploit, repeat strategy advocated by DevOps.
Explore, exploit, engineer for reliability
In the explore, exploit computational pattern, a learning entity faced with a new environment swings it’s behaviour like a pendulum across the explore-exploit behavioural spectrum. In the context of a DevOps team, exploration is a team exercise tackled at the beginning of each delivery cycle consisting of analysing the volatility of the undertaking’s components and attempting different models of encapsulation.
This focuses on team learning as an all-important phase of each team endeavour, ensuring that the whole team understands multiple aspects of the problem domain. It is this collective understanding that will allow them to effectively encapsulate volatility for their stakeholders and service consumers.
Having explored enough to truly collectively grasp their problem domain, the team swings over to the other end of the spectrum, exploitation, which leverages the learnings of the exploration phase to create fast and consistent value. The exploitation phase is about the automation of the key processes that deliver value and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). Site Reliability Engineering can be seen as Google’s “implementation” of DevOps. It provides more detailed guidance on role responsibilities, team processes, automation, monitoring and change release pipelines.
As illustrated by the below diagram, it is these repeated cycles that enable teams to control and lower the cost of change even as the number of services grows. This is in contrast with the traditional, failed approach to delivery that starts out cheap and fast, but quickly ramps up to slow and expensive because of unencapsulated volatility:
SRE as a role within a DevOps team is responsible for managing and decreasing the cost of change as envisioned in the above diagram. Kubernetes is the tooling an SRE would use to orchestrate their service domains. Anthos then gives teams of SREs the tooling and platform consistency needed to create a service monitoring and control dashboard across multiple services domains.
This platform consistency allows DevOps teams to stay plugged in to the metrics that matter (like the long term cost curve) and not get bogged down or led astray by vanity metrics (like early but unsustainable delivery wins).
Conclusion!
Africa is an industrial and technological revolution waiting to happen. This revolution, though, has the distinct advantages available to those who have watched others go to market before them. They have seen what went wrong and what went right and can do it all from scratch.
The impetus of this paper is that African enterprises looking to grow and truly introduce digital transformation have the opportunity to reshape the playing field using DevOps and Anthos which are practical tools for consistently clearing through complexity and arriving at fast, repeatable value.
As Africa bridges it’s own service gap, DevOps teams backed with the right tooling will be key to creating the velocity of production required to leapfrog global competitors. Many African corporations’ global competitors enjoy an established market lead but suffer ageing digital infrastructure, tooling and practices.
A well organised DevOps team with the right tools and a good understanding of the volatility they are encapsulating can deliver value much faster than a set of functional departments whose intrinsic value has, over time, become based on task completion rather than delivery of value.
The right tools will be tools that allow frictionless orchestration by teams of all the components that make up their solutions. The act of encoding infrastructure in Anthos not only creates consistency, reusability and scalability but also visibility to the teams at large.
With the entire team, from developers to delivery managers to SREs, able to discuss and work with the encoded architecture, many tasks that traditionally fell outside of the scope of a single team can now fall within it, allowing them to carry delivery and value all the way past the competition to the finish line.
Leave A Comment