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As multiple tools and clouds accumulate, cloud and DevOps-related roles become even harder to recruit for and upskill in, and custom portals show themselves to be complicated to develop and maintain, it becomes clear that there are multiple market challenges. And while some organisations build their own internal platforms based on open source solutions and some software vendors offer cloud management platforms, new proposals, between DevOps and multi cloud adoption, also appear.

Today, the technology and cloud offered to IT departments plays out in two main ways: internal DIY based on open source products or cloud management platforms.

“For the first approach, the main issue comes from the fact that operating this way requires a lot of resources and a lot of time to develop and maintain the solution. It’s hard to stay up-to-date with the technological frenzy and internal solutions are consequently often incomplete and lie outside of the company’s core business. On the other hand, cloud management platforms focus only on infrastructure management, but the entire application lifecycle management must be integrated to ensure a global and efficient approach. There’s another issue: the CMP approach is a closed one, meaning it’s not possible to get access to the automation. It’s also usually a fixed approach, set by the vendor and not by the client company’s teams,” explains Benjamin Brial, founder of Cycloid.

Bearing all this in mind, Cycloid, which was founded in 2015, developed a proposal aligned with the current challenges. A DevOps framework that accelerates the DevOps and multi-cloud approach. Cycloid takes the shape of a DevOps platform capable of addressing DevOps and cloud challenges. The goal? To allow all collaborators to optimize the way they use technologies and clouds and to contribute to a project that respects everyones’ skills and helps build bridges between teams.

“Today there are 5 big trends that shape the enterprise market: first, Covid-19 which dramatically accelerated a new digital wave. Then, cloud and software became key ingredients of the transformation from a technical angle. Trust and security became essential; it obviously concerns infrastructures and companies must pay particular attention to the hosting and mining of their data. In parallel, the shortage of DevOps profiles automatically conditions competition from a recruitment point of view. Finally, environmental concerns also appear as a key topic in terms of business transformation, and here, migration to the public cloud is a direct and concrete contribution. Considering these five trends, cloud and software are the cornerstone of this global change. For large organisations, the challenge is now to keep up to speed and innovate as a consequence. How can you help technical teams collaborate? How can you improve their collaboration? These questions make tooling DevOps roll out and improving teams’ rapprochement - i.e. have them work together on common practices - absolutely critical to forge a strong culture and maintain a continuum,“ says Philippe Ensarguet, chief technology officer at Orange Business Services.

As a Cycloid user, Ensarguet found a way to answer each of the requirements of a constantly changing market: first, because Cycloid is an open solution, based on open source, which helps create bridges between teams, while respecting best software engineering practices. This way, Cycloid focuses on interactions at a global scale, not only on parts of the problem,and aims to answer all governance and flexibility questions through a self-service portal oriented to DevOps and multi cloud.

“Cycloid facilitates DevOps to leverage the open source approach on which Cycloid is based and give them a hand so they can work on governance with solution architects and CTOs. Our goal is to improve the efficiency of daily operations via our DevOps and multi-cloud portal, while dramatically reducing the number of tickets in production. We want DevOps engineers to be able to focus on high value tasks such as automation and the evangelization of best practices. Cycloid’s goal is to make both the automation developed by DevOps and the multi-cloud approach accessible. From our point of view, things are very clear: the DevOps roll out must be industrialized. Our goal is to fill in the gaps and interoperate with what’s been developed internally by teams and the technologies they are using. We’re cloud provider “agnostic” and we rely on standard market technologies like Terraform and Ansible,” continues the Cycloid founder.

With the experience of its unique approach and a deep understanding of DevOps as part of its DNA,, Cycloid now aims to accelerate on the French market and develop new markets in Europe, especially in the United Kingdom. They will also continue to develop their open source strategy and help and accompany DevOps and multi cloud moves, especially around service catalogue, Infra-as-Code and FinOps topics.

“We will always have more and more digital, cloud, and software in the coming years. The need becomes industrial. Enterprises need to proceed with a massive transformation of their infrastructures. Industrialising only what we built, without integrating operations and maintenance is a mistake and will limit our ability to scale. Including these aspects from the beginning of an industrialisation project is an absolute need. And here, open source becomes truly fundamental in the innovation and co-innovation model,” concludes Ensarguet.

Translated from the original article from Informations Entreprise N° 179 Juillet/Août/Septembre 2021