MODERN CLOUD, NATIVE PLATFORM
OFFICE OF THE CTO

MODERN CLOUD
NATIVE PLATFORM
GETTING AHEAD
WITH AN ADAPTIVE STRATEGY

OFFICE OF THE CTO

MODERN CLOUD, NATIVE PLATFORM
OFFICE OF THE CTO

DEAN HOGAN
SOLUTION DEVELOPMENT,OFFICE OF THE CTO
Dean is a Solution Leader and responsible
for creating the solutions and services ourcustomers require to implement their digitalstrategy and improve developer productivity.
Dean has been with Computacenter for sevenyears, working with customers to adopt cloudnative platforms and services, and has over 30years’ enterprise IT experience in technical andleadership roles.

Back in 2020 McKinsey* released insights from research
they conducted on how Developer Velocity is a key indicatorof business performance and that “improving softwaredevelopment comes down to empowering developers,
creating the right environment for them to innovate, andremoving points of friction.” Although it is a couple of years
old now, McKinsey’s report and their Developer Velocity
Index (DVI) remains a useful reference, especially for large
enterprises in identifying the leading capabilities known
to correlate with high business performance. Amongtheir 13 developer velocity dimensions, they noted “tools,product management, culture, and talent management as
having the greatest impact on business performance”. The
DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) is another highly
respected framework. Having been looking at the topic
of high performance in software delivery for many years,
DORA has a proven set of research and assessments tools
used to determine the pathway, priorities, and benefits for
improving Developer Velocity.

Teams can be assessed and aligned to performance levels,with each level focusing on a set of capabilities that areshown to have the biggest benefit for improvement.
For those enterprise IT leaders responsible for softwaredelivery and platform services, improving Developer Velocity
is becoming an increasingly important objective, and as
new industry initiatives emerge and ultimately mature, weexperience two things.
Firstly, a convergence of features across the tools andpractices used, which in turn drives confidence in adoption.
Secondly, an increase in market volatility and uncertainty
that can disrupt technology strategies and investment
plans. One example of this is container-based cloud nativeplatforms. It is worth exploring this topic further and how, bytaking the right approach in software delivery, deployment
and platform operations, a vendor platform choice canbe made with confidence and without fear of disrupting
operational initiatives and adapting IT strategies.

Devops Capability Priorities

LOWMEDIUM• Continuous testing• Cloud infrastructures• Core maintainability• Continuous integration• Continuous delivery• Architecture

HIGH• Learning culture• WIP limits• Trank-based development* McKinsey & Company: Developer Velocity: How Software Excellence Fuels Business PerformanceELITE• Organisational culture• Observability• Small batches

MODERN CLOUD, NATIVE PLATFORM
OFFICE OF THE CTO

The modern container market is now over 10 years old, thatis assuming you see the launch of Docker Inc as a marker
in modern container technology. And during that time the IT
industry has continued to move at rather dynamic place, theISV market, being at the extreme end of this volatility. With thecontainer technology market now maturing cloud native startups and acquisitions are happening at an alarming rate. Overthe last 3 years we have seen IBM acquire Red Hat, SUSE acquireRancher, Mirantis acquire Docker Enterprise and more recently
the potential acquisition of VMware by Broadcom has everyone’s
attention. For any IT professional tasked with choosing acontainer platform over the coming few years, it can beparticularly challenging to determine where there are sufficient
points of stability in the market, so as not to create levels oftechnical debt that could see operational costs increase rather
than reduce.
What is more, the container platforms these vendors initiallycame to market with have now evolved to be become modern
cloud native platforms. These serve as operational enablers bysupporting highly automated pathways for software delivery,and strategic enablers by providing cloud heterogeneity andaiding improvements in developer velocity. Add to this that acurrent container orchestration platform is no longer restricted
to running just cloud native applications, but instead cansupport traditional enterprise workloads also, and your modern
cloud native platform becomes a key asset in any strategy offuture proofing software delivery for the business.

This means when implemented as a set of productised
platform services, and supporting a unified approach forsoftware delivery, a modern container platform will provide
the automation needed to deploy, and run software in a securemanner, as well as providing the abstraction needed to support
mobility between infrastructure providers. The ability to choose
and shift compute consumption across different infrastructure
providers, both public and private, is of greater considerationenterprises as their use of cloud services mature. Typicalrationale for this flexibility includes continuity of IT services,
shifts in IT strategy due to market forces, and changes in IT cost
control and focus.
Across our customer engagements, we see four strategic
themes arising for container platform adoption.

MODERN CONTAINERPLATFORMS ARE
BOTH STRATEGICAND OPERATIONALENABLERS, PROVIDINGHIGHLY AUTOMATED
PATHWAYS FOR SOFTWARE
DELIVERY, CLOUD
HETEROGENEITY AND
AIDING IMPROVEMENTS IN
DEVELOPER VELOCITY.

DEAN HOGAN
SOLUTION DEVELOPMENT,OFFICE OF THE CTO

MODERN CLOUD, NATIVE PLATFORM
OFFICE OF THE CTO

STRATEGIC
THEMES DRIVINGCONTAINER
PLATFORM
ADOPTION

Workload heterogeneity

Data strategy alignment

Businesses drive a diverse set of requirements, and withit comes numerous use cases, technical constraints,and demands for scaling software development andinfrastructure runtimes. Providing a platform that cansupport each of these enables IT development andoperations to adapt and accelerate with the business.

Data strategies that look to externalise or monetisebusiness data or leveraging ML to gain better insights are
now commonplace. These are driving a demand for scalable
compute, standardised patterns for ML pipelines, andon-demand access to both streaming and persistent dataservices, across localised and regional boundaries. There isa significant amount of platform complexity and automatedgovernance needed to enable this.

Cloud provider independence

Increasing Developer Velocity

The drive to compete and deliver differentiating businesssoftware has led to the rise of cloud native applications built
and deployed on public cloud services. This is increasing
the risk of cloud provider lock-in and while it is a generally
an accepted trade-off during the early stages, maturing
cloud adoption means platform teams are increasingly
looking at codified and declarative ways to abstract control
of infrastructure, platform builds and software deployment
from individual cloud providers.

Businesses have faced challenges in hiring and retaining
the scale of IT talent needed to accelerate the rate ofsoftware delivery. The need to increase the quality, security
and speed of software delivery has led to the adoptionof DevOps practices, and agile frameworks. However, key
to increasing developer velocity is the removal of thedistractions developers face in creating their code, byimproving the end-to-end automation of building, testing,deploying software, and applying security policies.

MODERN CLOUD, NATIVE PLATFORM
OFFICE OF THE CTO

When planning cloud native platform architectures and service
capabilities, we also see increased focus on new operating
capabilities, that enable high performing software delivery andoperational efficiencies, such as:
Cloud native architectures – providing an operating
environment that delivers resilience and scale throughhorizontal scaling, distributed processing, and automating thereplacement of failed components.
Simplified multi-cluster management – ensuring endto-end management, visibility, and control of your cluster
and application lifecycle, along with improved security andcompliance of your entire Kubernetes domain - across multiple
datacentres and public cloud environments.
Shifting security left – automating DevSecOps by integratingwith CI/CD pipelines and image registries, leveraging policy
templates to enforce security and configuration best practices
and provide continuous scanning and assurance.
Curated private software catalogues – providing andmaintaining a catalogue of trusted and tested open-source
software used to accelerate application build and deployment.
This trusted software is published to developers andprovisioned using automated methods across the enterprisecontainer environments.

Enterprise resilience – providing the means to withstanderrors and failures without data loss and provide reliableapplication services that contribute to business continuity.
Generally achieved through redundant access paths andcomponent resiliency, and the provision of DR backup services
to application teams.
Developer Experience – providing developers with the set ofUI, API & CLI features, along with SDK and code libraries that
simplify code create and run in container native environments.
Typically providing open standards-based Containers andFunctions as a Service.
Mixed workloads and platforms – supporting the broader
demands of enterprise workloads, that are based on Windows
as well as Linux. Enabling cluster creation and lifecycle
management of bare metal, multiple hypervisors and chip sets
used for edge/IOT. Providing container and virtual machinesorchestration.
Sandboxed containers – providing an additional layer ofisolation for applications with stringent security requirements
via an OCI compliant container runtime using lightweight virtual
machines running workloads in their own isolated kernel.

MODERNCONTAINER
PLATFORM
OPERATINGCAPABILITIESMODERN CLOUD, NATIVE PLATFORM
OFFICE OF THE CTO

A HIGHLY STANDARDISEDCORE BUILT ON
TRANSFERABLE OPEN
STANDARDS PROVIDEDBY FEW KEY VENDOR
PRODUCTS, AND THE
BULK OF CUSTOMISEDSERVICES, AUTOMATION
AND DEVELOPER
EXPERIENCE BUILTFROM SEPARATE OROPENSOURCE TOOLS.

DEAN HOGAN
SOLUTION DEVELOPMENT,OFFICE OF THE CTO

These strategic and operational capabilities should bedefined in any modern cloud native platform architecture,
like the one shown below. We see customers consideringa highly standardised core built on transferable openstandards provided by few key vendor products, and thebulk of customised services, automation and developer
experience built from separate or opensource tools.

You would be hard pushed to implement a Modern Cloud
Native Platform without the inclusion of Kubernetes. The
open-source community have done a significant amountof work over the last 10 years to not only stabilise andsecure Kubernetes, but also enhance its ability to meet thedemands these broader operational capabilities. As a result,
it is now at the heart of modern cloud native platforms
and is a far greater enabler of strategic and operational
imperatives.

Modern Cloud Native Platform for software deliveryMODERN CLOUD, NATIVE PLATFORM
OFFICE OF THE CTO

Future Proofing Cloud Native
Platform Investments
The volatility of the container ISV market continues to surge
forward, with start-ups and acquisitions happening at an
amazingly high rate, making vendor container platform
selection a challenging exercise. With uncertainty whenplanning expenditure, influencing product roadmaps, and being
confident in the long-term availability of platform features,
thoughts are often dominated by the notion of technical debt.
Define this how you will, but typically high impact changes
down the line most often arise from the human effort needed toapply corrections to either hardware or software implemented
at scale, which can be amplified by technical and architecturalcomplexity. However, the benefits of vendor technical expertise
taking care of the quality and security of your platform iscompelling. So how do you make choices that do not lead you toa compromised outcome?
There are areas across the software delivery and platform
infrastructure services that you maintain a degree of control
over, that can reduce the impacts of changes in vendor market.
In principle these exist in the following areas:How you build your container images
and leverage standard patterns
How you automate
your application deployment
How you apply policy-based automationof your container clusters

The maturity of platform vendors now available, means you
have options in how you implement your platform services.
On the one hand, you can take a singular and more integrated
and supported set of products from a strategic vendor ofchoice, which spans the broader scope of software delivery
and CNAP core. Alternatively, you can take a more modular
approach, leveraging parts of the CNAP core from multiple ISV &Hyperscaler providers, and marry this with an independent ISV
or open-source choice of products for the 3 areas above.
A good example of how the leading vendors have embraced thisis VMware’s recent announcement at their annual conference
Explore 2022, with their Tanzu Application Platform (VMware’s
set of developer tools and curated path to production forbuilding and deploying software) now officially supporting
Openshift as a target Kubernetes platform.
Given these options now means the enterprise platform teams
can make a strategic and unified tooling choice at this buildand deployment layer for software delivery and making vendors
choices that are built on open-source projects, can provide
you with the power to leverage varied Kubernetes platforms as
your situation demands Sourcing a unified container platform
with the right platform and software delivery architecture canensure investments are optimised for the longer term andcontinue to support a business’s strategy of innovation.

THE MATURITY OF
PLATFORM VENDORS NOWAVAILABLE, MEANS YOUHAVE OPTIONS IN HOWYOU IMPLEMENT YOUR
PLATFORM SERVICES.

DEAN HOGAN
SOLUTION DEVELOPMENT,OFFICE OF THE CTO

MODERN CLOUD, NATIVE PLATFORM
OFFICE OF THE CTO

Office of the CTO
The Office of the CTO (OCTO) team leads in the exploration
and application of technology products and delivery
methodology to aid the digital transformation of ourcustomers.
As a team of cross functional technologists with extensive
industry and IT experience we deliver thought leadership,advice and real-world implementation experience to help
our customers achieve their goals.

Computacenter (UK) Ltd
Hatfield Avenue, Hatfield, Hertfordshire AL10 9TW, United Kingdom
computacenter.com+44 (0)1707 631000