River Island

Tonino Greco, Head of Cloud, Infrastructure, and Operations

Implementing a Central Cloud Deployment Platform

Tonino Greco

Cloud Platform Architect

Implementing a central cloud deployment platform offers numerous benefits, such as reducing deployment times and enabling teams to focus more on application development.   Among these benefits is the ability to establish a standardized approach for deploying applications in a cloud environment, as this reduces the need for resources working on deployment code, reduces the need for teams to learn to write Infrastructure-As-Code (IaC), and importantly increases teams’ ability to get their code into a cloud environment quickly.  Below are three key reasons to do this.

Three Reasons for Embracing a Central Cloud Deployment Platform

Maintain a Standard Deployment Approach

A central cloud deployment platform has many benefits.  One of these is to create a standard way that the development/delivery team will deploy into a cloud environment.  This means you get a standard approach for your deployments, so you get the ability to add custom and generic functions into the platform that can automatically take care of many tasks often overlooked.  These include monitoring, alerting, and security.  Other less obvious ones are linting, code vulnerability scanning, and finally testing (although this is specialized and would require automated testing to be available).  Having a platform means you can create a library of functions that teams can use to deploy, these can include functions that can be used to cover the standards above and allow these functions to be standardized across different teams.  These standards will then allow the operability teams to have a known and understood way of debugging and troubleshooting issues when they occur.

Maintain a Deployment Code

Now that you have this platform, you’ll need to maintain it.  Maintenance of deployment capabilities is notoriously labor intensive.  The more diverse and independent these systems become, the more maintenance they require, leading to longer upgrade times and an increased risk of chaos.  Having this central platform means you maintain IaC code in a central place, you maintain tools used centrally, and upgrades can become an automated process.  Each team will get a Pull Request (PR) automatically created when a new version of the tool is available, a new version of the shared modules, or even a new library function.  These automated PRs can do the heavy lifting, testing, and validations.  In a cloud environment, this is easy to test as you can spin up the new environment, validate it with the state of the “live” version, using automated testing, and release the changes as “nonbreaking”.  Maintenance of the toolset is done centrally and automation helps with the rollout. 

“The benefits of using a Cloud Deployment Platform are less time writing IaC and more time writing actual code – which is always a good thing.  Having a standard deployment mechanism means your operability teams know how to fix any issue in any team, regardless of their usage.”

Create More Productive Developers

The third benefit of the central cloud platform is productivity.  If you create a platform that is based on configuration, rather than code, you get the benefit of templating.  This means that a new development/delivery team can quickly get their code into a cloud environment without having to write the IaC themselves.  They can use templates already created by the development community to fast-track their code to Cloud.  Further productivity gains are in upgrading the platform.  Each team won’t have to worry about maintaining their IaC toolset and their dependencies on other teams’ modules – as mentioned above.  This will translate into gains in areas such as improving application code and improving the overall development process.  The beauty of a central library of functions for a deployment platform means that additional requirements and capabilities can be added, evaluated, and shared with everyone using the platform.  The benefits of these functions also extend to the tooling used.  Say you want to change the linting tool to something else, all you’d need to do is change that function in the Cloud Platform library and everyone would benefit.

The benefits of using a Cloud Deployment Platform are less time writing IaC and more time writing actual code – which is always a good thing.  Having a standard deployment mechanism means your operability teams know how to fix any issue in any team, regardless of their usage.  The disadvantages are also clear, if you read between the lines, developers will write less IaC.  For some, this is a massive disadvantage.  For others, this is a massive benefit, not worrying about IaC and focusing on productivity and boosting their efficiency.  While a central platform may reduce the need for developers to write IaC, which some may see as a disadvantage, the overall gains in productivity, consistency, and maintainability outweigh this drawback.  In your implementation of a Cloud Platform, remember that including developers who like writing IaC is essential.  Getting everyone on the teams to contribute makes this platform a success.

Central platforms are like modules and libraries in code. They speed things up and take away the heavy lifting.  They make lives and times easier, and they fulfill the requirements.  Having a standard approach that is easily maintained and that can speed up the development process is a must for any team.