With the rise of the DevOps culture, the challenge has now become how to enable “Dev” without the “Ops.”

It has long been the goal of platform-as-a-service providers and various serverless and public cloud providers to free developers from operational burden. Yet as a recent GitLab Inc. survey has shown, the number of developers who create the infrastructure on which their applications run has climbed to 34%.

The difficulty has been providing a level of infrastructure support that will carry an application completely through its lifecycle without forcing developers to dive deep into the operational weeds.

That’s the premise behind DeltaBlue, a Belgian-based company with a distributed PaaS solution focused on the application development market. The firm’s mantra is “Develop your code and leave the rest to us.”

It’s an enticing proposition, couched in the cloud native experience.

“When we started DeltaBlue, the only thing we had in mind was how we could make the lifecycle of applications and all the things you had to do with governance way more easy,” said William Janssen (pictured), chief executive officer of DeltaBlue. “Cloud native should make life fun again, it should focus on what you are actually good at. Developers should develop, someone from infrastructure and operations should focus on their key points and not try to mix them up.”

Janssen spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, in the latest episode of Cloud Native Insights, a series that focuses on transitions in the marketplace and how companies are making the journey to modernize and leverage cloud native technologies. They discussed DeltaBlue’s single-click solution, the firm’s application-first approach, use of gateway components to access cloud provider platforms and leveraging cloud native to derive business value.

Support for full lifecycle

DeltaBlue focuses on creating the same developer experience for both cloud native and traditional applications. After an application has been configured, DeltaBlue’s single-click platform supports the DTAP lifecycle through development, test, acceptance and production environments.

“From a development point of view, there is no need to have any kind of knowledge of infrastructure anymore,” Janssen explained. “With a single click of a button they have a complete DTAP environment. We built a one-web interface, a logical portal, and you can simply drag and drop any type of application, not just a microservices oriented or Kubernetes-based application, but any type from your acceptance environment to your production environment.”

The ability to develop and test across an application lifecycle offers users flexibility to identify the best performance solution without having to wrestle with the underlying infrastructure. One of DeltaBlue’s customers, New Relic Inc., recently signed a contract with the PaaS firm to see how this would work for business-to-business applications, according to Janssen.

Business-to-business firms often rely on commerce-as-a-solution services, such as Intershop, to help companies boost online sales. With more than 17,000 customers, New Relic is a cloud-based application observability platform that allows customers to track activity on websites and monitor product and service performance.

“An e-commerce application is about performance and slow page load response time will drop your revenue,” Janssen said. “What we’re going to do with New Relic is feed performance data back into the intelligent proxy in front of their application. They’re going to drop the new version of their Intershop application on a Thursday evening, go to sleep, wake up on Friday morning, and from the three versions, the best-performing website will be up and running. That’s the kind of intelligence and feedback we can put into our platform since we started with applications in mind first.”

Accessing cloud platforms

This “application first” philosophy from DeltaBlue is designed to let companies focus on in-house apps while taking full advantage of underlying solutions offered by cloud providers or on-premises platforms. Users of the company’s platform can access services provided by major cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, or IBM Cloud, according to Janssen.

DeltaBlue provides this interface by creating a complete abstraction layer between the cloud provider and its network. Janssen indicated that users can even move workloads between clouds, such as from AWS to Azure, if necessary.

“For every provider, we have gateway components,” Janssen said. “From our interface, you can simply go to a specific application and select the type of data center you want to run your application on. If your application is running on AWS, you get the gateway components with elements like an S3 bucket or Lambda or RDS based on the data center you are running in.”

The challenge facing DeltaBlue, or any platform seeking to connect with the vast array of cloud provider services, is the sheer volume of innovation in the space. As of January, AWS alone had 191 products and 6,305 announcements to date.

PaaS vendors may be able to connect users with many of these services through gateways, but there would likely be lag time between release and full access. While complete coverage is unlikely, a situation which Janssen acknowledges for AWS, there is also another argument to be made on behalf of developers: So what?

“They don’t care,” Janssen said. “From the perspective of a traditional application, there is no difference between running on Azure or Google Cloud. I think 80% of our customers are not interested in the data center they are running their application in, unless they have interest in specific functionality which is not available on our platform.”

Demonstrating business value

Regardless of the platform preferred by developers, the acid test for cloud native remains business value. This was recently highlighted by one of DeltaBlue’s clients, Wunderman Thompson Commerce, a digital agency which helps various enterprises expand e-commerce platforms.

Wunderman started a new project which required its developers to code for a large e-commerce application. According to Janssen, this would normally have required separate installs of Intershop environments onto laptop or desktop systems, a time-consuming process.

“Since they made their laptop and their development environment part of our platform, they can now simply drag and drop their complete Intershop environment to their laptop and start development in 10 minutes instead of a day and a half,” Janssen said. “Getting that kind of abstraction between encoding your application and getting it somewhere up and running with all the steps that need to be done between your development environment and your production environment, that’s going to add to business value.”

DeltaBlue’s role in providing continuous development across cloud providers represents an important dynamic in the cloud native world. Companies such as DeltaBlue and Vendia Inc. are building businesses around access to cloud systems without lock-in. Janssen’s company leverages serverless technology to free developers to focus on applications while Vendia tackles the problem of data sprawl across multiple platforms and allows it to be freely shared.

In the evolving cloud native world, data flows freely cross-platform and “Ops” gets taken off the developer’s plate.

“From our interface, you can simply go to a specific application and select the type of data center you want to run your application on,” Janssen said. “You shouldn’t be concerned about what kind of cloud you are actually using. What we think cloud native means is getting rid of the burden.”

Here’s the complete video interview, the latest in the continuing Cloud Native Insights series and one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

Photo: SiliconANGLE