Establish the cloud essentials
As you begin your journey to the cloud, the immediate requirements are provisioning the cloud infrastructure, typically by adopting infrastructure as code and ensuring it is secure with a secrets management solution to HashiCorp. These are the essential foundations for building a scalable, dynamic, futureproof cloud architecture. As cloud operating model consumption starts to pick up, you will need to implement and standardize on a set of shared services to take full advantage of the cloud. This introduces challenges around governance and compliance as the need for setting access control rules and tracking requirements become increasingly important.
In practical terms, that means embracing a cloud operating model across each layer of the stack, and implementing corresponding changes to people, process, and tools. This white paper examines the four principles of a cloud operating model, and presents solutions to help IT teams adopt this model across infrastructure, security, networking, and application delivery.
Zero Trust Networking with Service Mesh and API Gateway
As organizations continue to scale with microservices-based or cloud native applications, the underlying infrastructure becomes larger and more dynamic with an explosion of east-west traffic. This causes a proliferation of expensive network middleware devices with single points of failure and significant operational overhead exposed to IT teams. Consul provides a distributed service mesh that pushes routing, authorization, and other networking functionalities to the endpoints in the network, rather than imposing them through middleware. This makes the network topology simpler and easier to manage, reduces the need for expensive middleware devices within east-west traffic paths, and makes service-to-service communication more reliable and scalable. Adding Consul’s API Gateway provides consistent control and security for how north-south traffic is handled through a single, centralized control plane.
Enterprise IT needs to evolve away from ITIL-based control points, with their focus on cost optimization, toward becoming self-service enablers focused on speed optimization. It can do this by delivering shared services across each layer of the cloud, designed to assist teams deliver new business and customer value at speed.
To read full download the whitepaper:
Four Principles of a Cloud Operating Model
