Infosys TechCompass

Hybrid Cloud

Trend 14: SRE-driven, multi-cloud management to achieve operational efficiency and improved service availability

We see a paradigm shift in managing cloud operations as SRE-driven management offers more efficiency, productivity, better customer experience, and improved availability.

Traditional operations followed an ITIL framework for managing incidents. The L1/L2/L3 support structure based on experience and domain knowledge was created to solve issues and incidents based on their complexity. Moreover, the support was more tower-centric with regards to network, compute, and storage.

SRE brings together engineering aspects in five operational dimensions: engineering-focused teams, a collaboration between Dev and Ops teams, unified observability across platforms, automation and platform architecture to drive enhanced application availability. SRE adoption brings higher efficiency and drives higher reliability of cloud-hosted applications.

SRE also plays a large role in accelerating digital transformation and enhancing the user experience. It powers emerging digital solutions like digital virtual assistants, AR/VR-based troubleshooting, and agent- less service desks. SRE-based hybrid cloud operations help businesses to innovate faster, launch new products and offerings with a higher pace and reduce stress on service desk/IT teams.

Organizations need to focus on three key areas: SRE resources in terms of training and certifications, next-generation observability and automation platforms, and redefined operations structure and processes to align with the SRE way of operations.

Well-orchestrated cloud management platforms enable SRE-driven operations and empower developers to publish faster releases. Advanced observability platforms transform reactive, alertbased monitoring into pre-emptive event logs with trace-based observability. The AI/ML-powered platform performs real-time event correlation, noise suppression, anomaly detection, and potential root cause to precipitate faster resolution.

A leading US-based fast-food retailer implemented SRE to improve operational efficiency and application availability by partnering with Infosys. The program included implementing an automation and observability solution, re-skilling its existing team on full stack technologies and driving the SRE culture through coaching and training programs. The program delivered a 30% reduction in incidents, a 25% decrease in selfhealing incidents, and reduced environment provisioning time from two days to just two hours.

Hybrid Cloud

Trend 15: Cloud-native technologies adoption to build platforms for accelerated innovation and speed to market

Enterprises adopt container platforms to develop next-generation business applications. Containers decouple underlying operating systems and infrastructure and enable developers to build applications on any platform. The technology also offers seamless migration of applications across the cloud without any remediation or downtime.

Applications were once tightly coupled with the operating system and underlying infrastructure, which required significant remediation, testing, and validation effort to migrate applications to the cloud. Further, any patching/update in an operating system requires applications retesting. When applications are containerized, there will be no cloud lock-in, and applications will move seamlessly across the cloud. These efficiencies will help achieve real-time cloud brokerage capabilities.

Container technology is quite promising for developing and hosting next-generation digital applications. With built-in redundancy, containers offer extremely high-platform availability — a critical business requirement. Container solution eliminates the application's dependencies on underlying cloudnative technologies, enabling enterprises to move applications across hyperscalers without worrying about compatibility and migration costs.

Enterprises should build capabilities to provision, manage, and orchestrate container platforms. They should integrate containerized platforms with a DevOps toolset to ensure developers deploy their codes seamlessly without any complexity of the underlying container platform.

A leading US-based semiconductor manufacturing company and a top global financial management company partnered with Infosys to modernize their platforms to host and develop digital solutions. The firms improved their new service launch frequency by leveraging cloud-native technologies offered by various hyperscalers. This also helped their solution architects create and develop application deployment blueprints in a more automated manner, bringing reusability and speed.