Cloud transformation advice focuses on the journey to cloud. But what happens when cloud operations become an ongoing task?

These days, moving to cloud isn’t a wholesale lift and shift of everything to a public cloud. Done right, cloud operations can accelerate innovation and reduce costs. But lack of foresight can have the opposite effect. Hybrid models mean a mix of on-premises applications, cloud native build microservices and serverless applications, and containerized applications. Balancing fast development with security and compliance becomes an ongoing battle.

“Ever wonder how largescale companies like Amazon Web Services are able to deliver massively scalable services and operate massive data centers with fewer people?” asked Venkat Krishnamachari (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer of MontyCloud Inc. “It’s automation. As you scale, things must be automated [to] eliminate undifferentiated heavy lifting and help your developers move fast.”

Krishnamachari spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS Startup Showcase Event: Innovators in Cloud Data. They discussed how autonomous cloud operations are essential to accelerate digital transformation and simplify ongoing cloud management. (* Disclosure below.)

Avoid Wild-West-style cloud operations

The acceleration of cloud adoption from the COVID-19 pandemic has shifted into an ongoing process that is changing the operational landscape. By 2025, “nearly two-thirds of enterprises will be prolific software producers with code deployed daily, over 90% of apps cloud native, 80% of code externally sourced, and 1.6 times more developers than today,” according to International Data Corp.

“There’s no escaping it,” Krishnamachari said. “Cloud operations will no longer be an afterthought. DevOps will integrate with CloudOps. It’ll provide a seamless feedback loop so that bugs can be found sooner, fixed sooner, and uptime can be guaranteed.”

While companies are being driven to cloud by the need for remote operations, many expect to see savings from the associated reduction in capital expenditure. But pay-as-you-go models shift those costs to operational expenses, and high usage bills can cause sticker-shock.

“What customers find out is after moving to the cloud, the cost overruns are happening because of resources that are not provisioned correctly, resources that should not be running, Wild-West scenarios where everybody has access to everything and they over-provision,” Krishnamachari said.

When these costs plus security issues plus ongoing operational expenses from monitoring, governance and remediation hit businesses, they wonder at the financial wisdom of moving to cloud. But the root of the problem is not financial; it’s lack of cloud management expertise. Building cloud accounts, managing cloud regions, user onboarding, then building networking infrastructure and enabling application infrastructure on top are just some of the additional tasks associated with cloud operations.

As IT leaders step back after the push to move to cloud, they realize they need to standardize provisioning and operations, reduce the heavy lifting that comes with infrastructure as code, and enable the business team and the application team to work closely together.

“The path to intelligent applications is not easy because cloud is powerful, but it’s broad, and the talent required is deep,” Krishnamachari said.

DAY2 comes after day one

MontyCloud’s autonomous CloudOps platform DAY2 was created to fix the skills gap and provide standardization and automation in cloud operations.

“Our platform is called DAY2 because everything after day one of going to cloud needs a lot of expertise, and we decided that’s a fun area to go solve for our customers,” Krishnamachari said.

DAY2 is a fully hosted, managed software-as-a-service platform that brings the DevOps ethos to cloud operations. Rather than continuous development and faster delivery of software from development through operations, DAY2 enables continuous operations and improvement s in cloud environments, applications and services.

“A customer does not need to do anything but log onto montycloud.com, click a bunch of buttons and connect their AWS account,” Krishnamachari stated. “They can get visibility, security posture assessment, compliance posture assessment, all in those few clicks.”

The platform enables IT leaders with clear key performance indicators for digital transformation, answering both the “why” and the “how” of automation, according to Krishnamachari. “Autonomous cloud operations means developers can deploy newer workloads faster but with a level of guaranteed guardrail on security compliance and costs that sets them free,” he said.

Use cases prove the importance of automated cloud operations

It was the Thursday before cyber-Monday, and a traditional Fortune 200 global networking company was ramping up for a major sales event. Then disaster struck: Its on-premises data center and application went down. Rather than fixing its outdated setup, the IT team wanted to move the application to the cloud. They connected with MontyCloud through a common partner, and despite not having any cloud expertise, they were able to not only take their application from on-prem to cloud, but set up the cloud infrastructure, the networking, the application layer, the monitoring layer and the operations layer in just one day, Krishnamachari explained. Adding to the success, when cyber-Monday came to a close, the application had delivered three times more sales than expected.

“That’s what we mean by putting that kind of power in the hands of customers,”  Krishnamachari said.

Providing the born-in-the-cloud experience is MontyCloud’s goal, whether the customer is a traditional enterprise like the Fortune 200 company in the example above, a greenfield startup, or a company partway through its cloud journey. Part of DAY2’s success is that was built from the ground up as an event platform – and is currently the only event-driven cloud operations platform on the market, according to Krishnamachari.

“The cloud infrastructure emits events at every turn, every resource; every activity is expressed as an event,” he said. “So the future, we believe, belongs to an eventing model because it’s lightweight on the customer’s infrastructure; it goes easy on the cloud providers. More importantly, it gets the customer as close as possible to when the event happens.”

Planning for day two of cloud operations should happen on the first day of planning for cloud, according to Krishnamachari.

“You want to start the right way,” he said. “We are happy to help on the day one journey itself, and we can automate DAY2 along with it. Standardizing infrastructure operations, standardizing provisioning, security, visibility, compliance, cost. If any of this is an important milestone that customers have to achieve in their cloud journey, we can help.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase Event: Innovators in Cloud Data. (* Disclosure: MontyCloud Inc. sponsored this CUBE Conversation. Neither MontyCloud nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE