In the last few years, the trend of cloud environment on-demand — also known as Environment-as-a-Service (EaaS) — has gained ground in the software industry. That was only natural to happen, in the digital reality, since EaaS is based on automation and off-the-shelf service catalogs.
What does this mean? It means that DevOps teams can now automate the — once time-consuming and cumbersome — process of building and maintaining environments. As a result, they’re able to eliminate bottlenecks in the DevOps lifecycle and focus on new, potentially revenue-generating projects.
But, why don’t we take it from the top, to understand this much-talked about approach better?
What is a cloud environment?
Broadly speaking, a cloud environment is a dedicated space in the cloud, containing a shared pool of resources, necessary to perform a certain task. In this respect, cloud environments incorporate all the software, infrastructure, components and services a Dev team needs to complete a job.
Building and maintaining environments, however, can be too complex, time-consuming and costly to support today’s fast-paced development timelines; especially since they require continuous updates, changes, etc. That’s where the environment on-demand capability comes in, providing teams with a new way of tackling this issue.
What about cloud environment on-demand, aka Environment-as-a-Service?
The cloud environment on-demand — or Environment-as-a-Service — capability enables CIOs, and their teams to use a third-party platform, like Cycleops, to create a new cloud environment, whenever they need one. This self-service capability provides an ephemeral environment, as required, where the team automatically maps and sets up the necessary configuration to complete a project. The result is an all-in-one environment that DevOp teams deploy reliably and consistently, achieving rapid application development and deployment.
The 3 main benefits of the cloud environment on-demand approach
There are many reasons to opt for a cloud environment on-demand solution, but there are three specific benefits that can make a world of a difference for a CIO and their team.
1. Enabling self-service capability for DevOps efficiency
Recreating a cloud environment that contains complex configuration and infrastructure takes a considerable amount of time and effort. Not to mention, it leaves a lot of room for human-made errors to occur. On the contrary, automating the development environment takes the heavy burden away from the DevOps team, by simplifying the DevOps process. Consequently, an on-demand environment service makes it easy for a Devops team to create and manage environments quickly and reliably.
2. Increasing the speed of the development process
With an Environments-as-a-Service solution, the development process gets more streamlined, so teams won’t have to deal with environment-related bottlenecks anymore. On the contrary, they will be able to quickly roll out releases, as they will create or clone a cloud environment and perform tests in isolation (without interfering with other environments), at will. Due to this, the overall development speed will increase significantly — while time-to-market will decrease.
3. Reducing costs related to environment setup and management
In spite of the benefits the cloud offers, the danger of spending more money than initially intended is real. Thankfully, the cloud environment on-demand approach helps avoid this danger, from the get-go. How? By making everything visible and easily adjustable, without affecting the overall balance within an environment. In this regard, it not only keeps a check on setup and management expenditure, but also helps CIOs minimize costs; and even achieve scalability.
Deliver better applications to customers, while saving time and money
The cloud environment on-demand — or Environment-as-a-Service (EaaS) — approach is probably the most practical solution for CIOs looking to improve application development cycles. By opting for this solution, they’ll manage to increase application uptime and deliver reliable software faster, thanks to the self-service functionality.
Additionally, they’ll be able to solve pain points in the DevOps process, associated with human errors. In this way, teams will develop software fast and, thus, speed up time-to-market. This will greatly improve team collaboration and, by extension, productivity.
At the end of the day, automating environments will allow companies to deliver better applications to end-users (both internal and customers), while saving time and money.