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Tag: nOps

  • AWS Well-Architected Framework Elevates Agility

    AWS Well-Architected Framework Elevates Agility

    What started as a white paper from AWS, the Well-Architected Framework has evolved into a large ecosystem of partners and more

    In the past year, agility has become one of the most prized IT attributes as organizations race to deploy more workloads in the cloud. There is a paradox, however: The faster organizations deploy applications, the more likely mistakes will be made. Cloud computing deployments are rife with misconfigurations that are the direct result of developers provisioning cloud infrastructure rapidly and incorrectly. Application environments are almost never as efficient as they could be.

    The challenge and the opportunity IT teams now face is defining a set of best practices for securely and consistently deploying application workloads on cloud infrastructures that complement and extend agile development methodologies. IT organizations should not have to slow down application development and deployment because of security concerns. Identifying high-risk issues (HRIs) and being able to consistently achieve and maintain security without sacrificing agility is an absolute requirement.

    It seems that Amazon Web Services (AWS) couldn’t agree more. The cloud leader has defined the AWS Well-Architected Framework to help organizations build workloads on AWS that are secure, efficient, reliable, cost-optimized and operationally excellent.

    Through this effort, AWS hopes IT organizations benefit from removing the guesswork for building workloads on cloud. Cloud misconfiguration mistakes that conspire to make organizations question their commitment to agile development methodologies are eliminated. The only remaining issue is finding a set of tools that turn those AWS guidelines into a set of policies that can be achieved and enforced easily.

    Agile Meets Well-Architected

    In addition to making it possible to build and deploy applications faster, agile development methodologies make it possible to test the application code. IT teams gain unprecedented visibility into how applications behave. The equivalent of an application development methodology for managing cloud infrastructure is the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

    The Well-Architected Framework is battle-tested, based on best practices AWS has observed over its 14-year history. The pillars of the Well-Architected Framework are:

    1. Operational Excellence: Under this pillar, operations teams need to understand their business and customer needs so they can support business outcomes. Operations teams create and use procedures to respond to operational events and then validate their effectiveness to support business needs. Those teams also collect metrics that are used to measure the achievement of desired business outcomes. It’s important to design operations to support evolution in response to change and to incorporate lessons learned through their performance.
    2. Security: This pillar focuses on the importance of putting in place practices that influence security before any workload is architected. IT teams need to control who can do what. In addition, they need to be able to identify security incidents, protect systems and services, and maintain the confidentiality and integrity of data through data protection.
    3. Reliability: This pillar encompasses the ability of a workload to perform its intended function correctly and consistently when it’s expected to. This includes the ability to operate and test the workload through its total life cycle. The workload architecture of the distributed system must be designed to prevent and mitigate failures, handle changes in demand or requirements and be able to detect failures and automatically heal itself.
    4. Performance Efficiency: This pillar addresses the need to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve. Teams must gather data on all aspects of the architecture, from the high-level design to the selection and configuration of resource types and make trade-offs in their architecture to improve performance, such as using compression or caching or relaxing consistency requirements.
    5. Cost Optimization: This pillar focuses on how to run systems to deliver business value at the lowest price point. Design decisions are sometimes directed by haste rather than data, and it can be tempting to overcompensate rather than spend time performing benchmarking to determine the most cost-optimal deployment. As a result, deployments can be both overprovisioned and underutilized. Using the appropriate services, resources and configurations for workloads is key to cost savings.

    Each of these pillars requires tools to enable DevOps teams to proactively manage their cloud environments—not only by provisioning and deploying applications faster but also by making more informed decisions when considering trade-offs between performance, reliability, cost and security. It’s a balance as rarely are these decisions independent of each other.

    The COVID-19 Imperative

    The COVID-19 pandemic has made the Well-Architected Framework essential. The number of workloads being deployed on AWS has increased sharply as organizations of all sizes accelerate digital business transformation initiatives. IT projects that once were expected to take months to complete now are expected to be up and running in a matter of weeks.

    Also read:

    Grupo JCPM accelerates delivery of an ecommerce platform on AWS to meet COVID-19 needs of retail customers

    The number of application initiatives underway has increased as well. Organizations are trying to maximize their IT budget like never before as the number of applications being deployed on AWS increases steadily. IT dollars need to go further than ever, at a time most digital business initiatives are still relatively nascent in their ability to drive revenue.

    Cloud optimization is now an absolute necessity. The days are over when organizations could afford to allow developers to spin up virtual machines randomly. Every dollar spent on cloud resources needs to provide a quantifiable return on that investment.

    How and Why Mistakes Are Made

    Of course, haste makes waste. Applications that are built and deployed quickly inevitably wind up not only consuming more resources than required but also are rife with mistakes. Cloud services are riddled with misconfigurations. In addition, developers routinely employ open source tools such as Terraform or vendor tools such as AWS CloudFormation to programmatically provision cloud infrastructure, and while managing IT infrastructure as code absolutely increases productivity, too many developers aren’t familiar with the best practices for securing that type of infrastructure. It’s not uncommon for ports to be left wide open simply because a developer assumed the cloud service provider would take care of that task on their behalf.

    AWS is committed to making sure its platform is secure. The security of the overall environment is a shared responsibility between AWS and its customers. It’s up to each IT organization to make sure the applications they deploy don’t inadvertently expose a vulnerability that could be easily exploited. And it’s up to each DevOps team to ensure applications are deployed reliably and securely without slowing down the deployment rate of those applications.

    For its part, AWS provides financial incentives to get Well-Architected in the form of account credits provided directly to the customer when they implement recommended remediations identified during a Well-Architected Framework Review—an assessment using these best practices guidelines. Customers typically use these credits to offset costs or add the latest AWS services.

    How nOps Resolves Cloud Issues

    nOps provides DevOps teams with an integrated SaaS platform to monitor, analyze and optimize AWS changes, security, performance, reliability and operational excellence while optimizing costs. DevOps teams gain continuous insights into their AWS infrastructure health informed by an always-on, automated discovery process using Well-Architected guidelines, and cloud consultants use it to run AWS Well-Architected Framework Reviews with their customers.

    As an AWS ISV partner, nOps is unique in architecting its platform to align directly with the five pillars of the Well-Architected Framework. There are features that solutions architects love instantly, such as auto-discovery of high-risk issues (HRIs) and dashboards aligned with the Well-Architected pillars that let them instantly drill down to the resource level for fast root-cause analysis. But its real value is helping AWS customers and partners be smart when evaluating the pros and cons of their decisions when balancing cost, security and performance.

    nOps is committed to helping IT teams optimally manage AWS environments as cost-effectively as possible. The continuous feedback provided by nOps enables DevOps teams to make sure that once operational excellence is achieved, there is no sliding back.

    A Well-Architected Movement

    The Well-Architected Framework is being adopted broadly. What started as a white paper now includes hands-on labs, AWS and third-party tools, an ecosystem of trained partners and a broad AWS company  mantra. The principles defined by AWS are being applied broadly in the industry with the help of solution providers including nOps and hundreds of consulting partners certified on Well-Architected. We’re at the beginning of a new era of cloud computing that leverages automation to achieve a level of operational excellence never before possible. We’re committed to partnering with IT teams large and small to make that vision a reality.

    IT organizations that regularly conduct Well-Architected Framework Reviews will be recognized by vendors and peers alike as one of an elite cadre of IT professionals that have mastered AWS to optimize their modern infrastructure for business agility.

    View the AWS Well-Architected webinar and check out nOps to see how it can support your Well-Architected agenda.

    This sponsored article was written on behalf of nOps.

  • nOps Delivers API Integration with AWS Well-Architected Tool to Optimize AWS Well-Architected Reviews

    December 16, 2020 – SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – nOps, a leading Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud management platform for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and an AWS Advanced Technology Partner, announced a new API integration with the AWS Well-Architected Tool, available immediately. The company introduced additional new product features that support AWS Well-Architected Framework Reviews and enrich the product experience for partners and end-customers.

    The AWS Well-Architected Tool helps customers review the state of their workloads and compares them to the latest AWS architectural best practices. The tool is based on the AWS Well-Architected Framework, developed to help cloud architects build secure, high-performing, resilient and efficient application infrastructure. The new nOps API integration provides a seamless experience for AWS Partners to execute these AWS Well-Architected Framework Reviews. With the new integration, nOps partners can easily share information created by nOps during an AWS Well-Architected Framework Review with the AWS Well-Architected Tool for AWS program reporting requirements.

    “nOps is excited to deliver this integration with the AWS Well-Architected Tool,” said JT Giri, CEO and Founder, nOps. “We’re committed to creating the best AWS Well-Architected Framework Review experience for partners and their customers. This seamless integration between nOps and the AWS Well-Architected Tool increases the quality of AWS Well-Architected Framework Reviews while reducing the time needed to execute them.”

    “This is a bulls-eye,” said Nick Larsen, AWS Practice Lead at iOLAP, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner and AWS Well-Architected Partner. “With nOps, you have the hands-down best partner productivity tool for executing AWS Well-Architected Framework Reviews. This API integration with AWS delivers an elegant last mile for sharing assessment data and submitting program information.”

    AWS recently announced its AWS Well-Architected Tool Partner Integration Program committed to helping AWS Partners that offer tools that support or enhance AWS Well-Architected. nOps is among the selected Launch Partners in the program.

    nOps announced additional new features in its platform designed to expand partners’ and customers’ abilities to optimize AWS infrastructure. These include:

    • “Workloads” on nOps: Creating workloads on nOps allows partners to build a set of resources that can be used in any of the AWS Well-Architected assessments (such as  AWS Well-Architected Framework Review or AWS Foundational Technical Review). Auto-discovery is nOps’ secret sauce in workloads – based on the resources added to the workload, nOps can auto-answer AWS Well-Architected assessment questions.
    • nOps integration with Jira Cloud: Partners can use nOps to integrate with Jira Cloud and their Jira workspaces and synchronize issues in a two-way integration. For example, as partners identify high-risk issues (HRIs) in their customers’ infrastructure for remediation, they can create and update issues, add comments, and change statuses. The resources function can group a list of tickets.
    • Ability to design AWS Well-Architected Framework Review reports: Partners can use the nOps templates generator to create their AWS Well-Architected Framework Review reports for different scenarios. They can design the report layout and insert marketing or services blocks and their findings from nOps’ auto-discovery feature. They can then use those templates to export their AWS Well-Architected Framework Review reports.
    • nOps custom rules: Partners and end clients can use the nOps custom rules engine to create queries on their infrastructure and use the custom rules in different places in the product, such as dashboards, reports, and email notifications.

    The nOps platform is currently available in the  AWS Marketplace and through major distributors, including Ingram Micro Cloud.

    About nOps 

    nOps enables rapid-growth companies to monitor, analyze, and manage an AWS Well-Architected infrastructure that is cost-optimized, secure, reliable, efficient, and operationally excellent — and to help keep it that way through continuous compliance. Headquartered in San Francisco, nOps is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Advanced Technology Partner and has achieved AWS Cloud Management Tools Competency status for delivering operations and governance best practices to help partners and customers identify solutions that enable their cloud strategy. For more info, visit www.nops.io and follow at twitter.com/nopsio.

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  • Ingram Micro Cloud Teams with nOps to Drive Channel Partner Growth on AWS

    November 19, 2020 – IRVINE, Calif. – Ingram Micro Cloud today announced it has formed a strategic collaboration with nOps, a leading provider of cloud management software-as-a-service (SaaS) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Advanced Technology Partner. The alliance expands Ingram Micro’s offering of tools for reseller partners and managed service providers (MSPs) designed to help build an efficient, secure, and high-performing AWS infrastructure for their applications and workloads.

    Ingram Micro Cloud, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner and AWS Distributor, is dedicated to accelerating the growth of AWS Consulting and Technology Partners globally. Leveraging the nOps platform, Ingram Micro partners should be able to better maintain their customers’ AWS environments by ensuring continuous alignment with AWS Well-Architected Framework guidelines. The addition of nOps offerings is expected to help Ingram Micro partners more efficiently execute AWS Well-Architected Reviews designed to identify risk, provide cost-optimization insights and root cause analysis, and deliver fact-based assessments and remediation proposals to customers that drive higher project win rates.

    “Our guiding mission at Ingram Micro Cloud is to provide our channel partners with access to the industry’s largest and most robust cloud services portfolio, and nOps was an outstanding addition,” said Victor Baez, Vice President of Cloud Channel Sales at Ingram Micro Cloud. “We anticipate that, working with nOps, we can better empower our partners to build next-generation MSP practices that drive greater value and revenue opportunities for our channel partners.”

    “nOps is thrilled to team with Ingram Micro,” said JT Giri, CEO and Founder, nOps. “We share mutual excitement and expectations of scaling nOps’ success in helping AWS Consulting Partners and AWS MSP Partners grow their AWS practice while delivering outstanding support to customers. Our cloud management platform and Ingram Micro’s combination of scale and commitment to partner enablement is a winning combination.”

    Kaizen Technology Partners CEO, Dao Jensen, adds, “Given our 20+ years of experience as results-driven Cloud technology experts, we’ve worked strategically with both Ingram Micro and nOps and are honored to see their collaboration bring more value to our AWS practice. As an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, we are dedicated to solving our customers’ needs first and look forward to streamlining the way we help them optimize their cloud infrastructure and drive success.”

    For more information on Ingram Micro’s nOps solution offering check out the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace or contact Ingram Micro Cloud at IaaS@ingrammicrocloud.com.

    About Ingram Micro Cloud

    Ingram Micro Cloud brings together innovators and problem solvers to help the world accomplish more. It facilitates and manages the cloud’s complex digital value chain—all powered by CloudBlue technology. Ingram Micro Cloud operates in 64 countries with over 55,000 reseller partners, and its Cloud Marketplace serves 6.5 million seats, offering more than 120 cloud solutions. With unmatched global reach, easy access to automated go-to-market and integration tools, deep technical expertise, and a curated selection of scalable SaaS and IaaS solutions, Ingram Micro Cloud helps vendors, resellers, and managed service providers by offering More as a Service.  Detailed information is available at http://www.ingrammicrocloud.com.

    About nOps

    nOps enables rapid-growth companies and partners to build, manage, and run an AWS Well-Architected infrastructure that is cost-optimized, secure, reliable, efficient, and operationally excellent — and to help keep it that way through continuous compliance.

    Headquartered in San Francisco, nOps is an Advanced Technology Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN) and has achieved Cloud Management Tools Competency status for delivering operations and governance best practices to help partners and customers identify solutions that enable their cloud strategy. For more info, visit http://www.nops.io/ and follow at http://twitter.com/nopsio.