Canonical today made generally available an open source framework, dubbed MicroCloud, that leverages Linux containers and the Snap software packaging and deployment tools the company developed to automatically orchestrate the provisioning of cloud computing environments using a single command.
MicroCloud automatically creates a functional cloud computing environment in minutes that can be deployed anywhere, including edge computing environments, using policies defined by an internal IT team to ensure the appropriate guardrails are in place. All components can also be updated over the air in a way that preserves data, and if any errors occur, rollbacks are automated.
Miona Aleksic, product manager of MicroCloud, said the platform enables organizations to democratize DevOps workflows in a way that becomes accessible to the average IT administrator.
In effect, Canonical is making cloud computing more accessible in a way that is reminiscent of its creation of the Ubuntu distribution of Linux that is easier to deploy and install, she added.
As IT environments become more distributed, programmatically spinning up infrastructure resources has become more challenging. MicroCloud enables IT teams to provision resources more easily at the point where data is being created, analyzed and consumed, noted Aleksic.
It should also improve cybersecurity because many of the cybersecurity issues that organizations encounter today can be traced back to infrastructure misconfigurations, she added.
It’s not clear how automated the provisioning of IT environments is about to become, but the demand for applications today far exceeds the ability of many DevOps teams to keep pace. Much of the toil that leads to burnout among DevOps teams stems from the manual tasks that persist within workflows. In theory, the more low-level tasks—that don’t add much in the way of differentiated value to the business—can be automated, the more time there should be to address more complex issues.
That’s critical at a time when many organizations still struggle to find and retain DevOps engineers. In addition, the simpler it becomes to automate the provisioning of infrastructure, the more accessible DevOps best practices become for small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) that historically couldn’t afford to hire software engineers.
One way or another, DevOps workflows will need to become more automated. There is naturally a lot of focus on artificial intelligence (AI), but while that approach holds a lot of promise, there are clearly advances to be made using a range of existing automation frameworks. The challenge organizations have encountered is that writing the playbooks required to automate processes requires a level of expertise they generally lack.
Platforms such as MicroCloud present IT teams with an alternative approach that should reduce the cognitive load developers encounter whenever they want to provision IT infrastructure. Arguably, the one reason developers provision infrastructure themselves is that previously it simply took too long for IT teams to do it on their behalf.
It may be too early to determine whether or not tools such as Terraform are required to provision infrastructure, but it’s clear that most developers would rather spend their time writing code instead of managing infrastructure.
