Putting the Dev in AppDev and DevOps Is Easier With Google Cloud Platform
Having your backend infrastructure in the cloud makes sense—but a major benefit of moving to the cloud is that it also speeds your ability to develop apps. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offers a rich assortment of tools and services that can really make DevOps a reality and drive success for your app development teams.
Remember the old days of IT? The clichés persist. Ten, maybe 15 years ago, software developers were the creative folks, jeans-and-T-shirt dressers, who wrote imaginative new apps and ran rogue deployments. On the other side of the fence their counterparts, the ops team would cringe as these new apps emerged, knowing that supporting them would put ops teams in a world of hurt. While the dev teams want speed and flexibility, the ops team was concerned about control and stability of the production system.
This classic divide between Dev and Ops is what led to the DevOps concept. While DevOps still means different things to different organizations, the most consistent, sustainable idea behind DevOps is pretty simple: Dev and Ops teams usually report to the different IT executives with different agendas and roadmaps, the goal of DevOps is clear – do what it takes for IT to help the business succeed. That means greater cooperation between Dev and Ops teams, and evidence shows the DevOps concept has found solid footing.
Enter the Cloud
The new era of cloud computing has brought greater opportunities for the DevOps concept to succeed. The use of containers as an alternative to VMs, for example, has helped developers work in safe, smaller footprints that revise the configuration management practices of yesterday; at the same time, containers are allowing IT ops teams to embrace new deployment architectures created by dev teams (eg. microservices), which means that maintaining systems will be far easier – and less expensive than VMs – as the container concept takes flight.
Here, let’s step back and look at a broader set of benefits that the cloud holds for software development teams. Containers are definitely part of it. There’s also the ability to spin up new servers in the cloud to host testing environments on-demand, or to test and simulate new data environments for applications under development. Access to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings have lowered the barrier to entry for building new products and delivering new capabilities.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is one of the best examples of a modern services environment for application development teams delivering against today’s cloud requirements. Consider these three powerful capabilities that Google Cloud Platform offers the software developer.
1. Containerization
Containers and service-based (CaaS) architectures are among the major reasons Google Cloud Platform is so popular with application development teams. As Google describes it, “containerization allows our development teams to move fast, deploy software efficiently, and operate at an unprecedented scale.” From its early development and contribution of control groups for the Linux kernel, to the creation of open source tools for Kubernetes, the team behind Google Cloud Platform has demonstrated a hard-core commitment to the way successful developers need to get things done.
If you want to learn more about containers and how they are revolutionizing software development and operations, Google offers a great general description that can get you up to speed. For those of you already familiar with containers and the advantages of microservices architectures, you should know that “Kubernetes runs best on Google Cloud Platform. Google Kubernetes Engine is the premier managed Kubernetes solution that gets you quickly set up and production-ready.” This ensures your container clusters are constantly up-to-date, highly available, and secure. It’s also good to know that GCP can handle all your container management needs, including the tools you need to use containers from development to production, including “Docker image storage and management, and Google’s Container-Optimized OS that provides a lightweight, highly secure operating system that comes with the Docker and Kubernetes runtimes pre-installed.”
2. Collaborative Development
For development teams looking to work from a secure Git repository, Google’s Cloud Source Repositories offer a way to design, develop, and securely manage code. Developers can mirror code from GitHub or Bitbucket in free and unlimited private repositories. Built-in continuous integration feedback includes setting up triggers for auto build and test. Developers can “build, deploy, verify, and debug in minutes.”
Cloud Source Repositories not only allow collaborative development between team members. They can also be used with Stackdriver Debugger for real-time debugging of cloud apps.
3. Mobile App Development
Any comprehensive cloud-based development environment should include a rich set of tools and resources for the mobile app developer. Google’s Firebase Test Lab is a complete testing infrastructure for mobile apps that lets you initiate testing of your app across a wide variety of devices and device configurations, with a single operation. For both Android and iOS apps, your test results come down to the Firebase console, and they include logs, videos, and screenshots for your project.
It’s all made real because Firebase Test Lab tests your app against actual production devices running in a Google data center. Devices use updated APIs with customizable locale settings, which means you can road-test your app on the hardware it will come up against in the real world...out there.
Let IGNW Help Your Development Team Get Started
IGNW is a Google partner who can help you succeed with any aspect of migration to Google Cloud Platform. With GCP, you’ll get the agile edge you need for application development and deployment. Contemporary DevOps done with Google Cloud Platform will help your IT teams think outside the box – faster and more securely.