How to Transform Your DevOps Journey with emma

In today’s fast-paced enterprise environments, developer productivity and rapid innovation are more critical than ever. However, their productivity should not come at the cost of operational efficiency or overall business value, even as organizations turn to a diverse array of cloud providers and different business units seek unique cloud services for their needs. In this situation, optimizing workloads and CI/CD pipelines across diverse environments while balancing speed, control, and autonomy can become a challenge for DevOps.

Optimizing Cloud Operations is Essential for DevOps

DevOps’ true expansion began with the cloud. Cloud platforms offered unprecedented scalability that allowed DevOps' core principles of continuous development, integration, and delivery to succeed. However, the cloud landscape is not what it once was. Today, the cloud market is brimming with options beyond mainstream hyperscalers. Each cloud provider offers its own specialized services and thrives on unique strengths. As a result, different teams and business units within a single organization need to use different types of services most suitable for their needs, creating chaos for engineering teams.

DevOps, which originally aimed to break down silos, again faces a fragmented ecosystem due to cloud sprawl and issues like unique configurations, visibility, and inconsistent governance that come with it. Only by streamlining cloud operations, DevOps can deploy applications faster, minimize resource wastage, handle rapid changes, and implement feedback loops for continuous improvement based on user demands.

DevOps must Embrace Multi-Cloud

According to the Google Cloud DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team's "2024 Accelerate State of DevOps" report, moving to the cloud without adopting its flexibility is actually more harmful than staying within the data center. In a complex environment, balancing “the right tool for the job” and simplicity is challenging, but DevOps must accept and adapt or risk losing out on the cloud benefits altogether. They must focus on integration and, more importantly, cloud-agnosticism to ensure that most workloads can run on any type of cloud provider and infrastructure. This way, if certain parts of an application operate on different clouds, they can do so harmoniously.

DORA recommends building “Golden Paths” to foster developer independence, which has been shown to improve developers' productivity and organizational performance. These are highly automated, self-service workflows that developers can use to interact autonomously with the resources needed to deliver and operate applications. Ideally, these paths should abstract away the complexities and differences of the underlying platforms, allowing developers to focus solely on their code. Sounds idealistic, but emma can do that.

emma Helps Build “Golden Paths” to Transform DevOps

The emma cloud management platform is a fully agnostic, end-to-end solution that adds a layer of abstraction above multiple cloud and on-premise infrastructures. This enables users to manage all their environments as a cohesive whole. With emma's intuitive dashboard, DevOps teams can centrally deploy, manage, and optimize resources across Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, Alibaba, and other specialized cloud providers, as well as on-prem environments. This cloud-agnostic approach allows DevOps to define consistent workflows, ensuring seamless operation and optimization of resources across different providers.

To optimize DevOps in multi-cloud environments, emma focuses on:

• Standardized deployment: emma standardizes the deployment of core resources like virtual machines (VMs) and container services across all cloud environments. Resources deployed through emma behave consistently and can move freely across different clouds, enabling DevOps to embrace cloud-agnosticism with ease.
• Self-service portal: emma’s self-service portal provides those “Golden Paths” out-of-the-box, reducing friction between platform engineers and DevOps teams. It allows DevOps to self-provision the resources they need and automate the entire resource lifecycle without requiring help or approvals from infrastructure personnel. This reduces the burden on platform/cloud engineers, speeds up production times, and enhances developer productivity by eliminating unnecessary handoffs between teams.
• API-first design:  emma is built with an API-first philosophy, enabling DevOps teams to automate and deploy through emma’s intuitive dashboard or continue using their preferred tools, languages, and platforms via emma’s built-in integrations, such as the emma Terraform provider and Backstage plugins.
• Cost and performance optimization:  emma visualizes complex cost and performance data for all teams, empowering DevOps to make data-driven decisions for their workloads. With emma’s AI-powered actionable insights, teams can choose the optimal cloud and cloud regions, leading to better performance and cost savings. Additionally, emma’s inter-cloud networking backbone optimizes performance by ensuring seamless, more efficient communication between VMs and containers interacting across different cloud providers.

Make Your DevOps Future-Ready with emma’s Cloud Agnostic Approach

Cloud footprints will continue to expand, and infrastructure environments will grow increasingly complex and fragmented. The best approach for DevOps is to work with this complexity, not against it. emma’s vendor-agnostic approach provides an excellent starting point, as you can sign up today and simply start experimenting without any commitments.

Join emma’s Chief Product Officer, Matthias Lübken, and Lucy Wang (Tech With Lucy) as they discuss in-depth about embracing cloud-agnosticism and creating Golden Paths to streamline, expedite, and transform DevOps for the needs of today and tomorrow.

Interested in emma? Book a zero-commitment, FREE demo today!