The Australian Government has a long-term commitment to shifting its technology backend to the cloud.
As part of this initiative, the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) launched its Secure Cloud Strategy in 2017, revisiting it in 2021. The focus of the SCS is to help departments and agencies move towards a more agile method of service improvement, all the while doing it securely and efficiently.
A key point of the strategy is it allows agencies to develop cloud strategies to suit their own needs.
But it’s also critical to note some agencies won’t move their operations to cloud service providers (CSPs), instead preferring to run cloud-based applications on-premises for security and data sovereignty reasons.
The wrinkle in this shift to the cloud – whether it’s through a CSP or on-prem – is that applications can be hard to manage, requiring significant developer resources for the Day One roll out and then for the subsequent Day Two running of the applications.
This is where Kubernetes and application management automation comes into play.
Rolling out cloud applications is time consuming – but there is a better way
“It can take up to 45 days to roll out an application because of the high level of governance around security,” says Mark Swalwell, Director for APJ, Kasten by Veeam. “With automation, that figure falls to around 13 days.”
Kasten focuses its business on Kubernetes, which is an open-source platform, originally developed by Google but handed over to the open-source community. Kubernetes automates many of the manual processes involved in deploying and scaling containerised applications.
The best way to think of Kubernetes is as software that manages many servers and runs a large number of applications across those computers.
With Kubernetes, all applications run in containers so they can be isolated from one another and be easy to develop and deploy. Containers work well because they offer speedy deployment, workload portability and are a good fit with the DevOps way of working.
“Once organisations understand the benefits of containers and Kubernetes for DevOps it opens up so many possibilities,” says Ashesh Badani, SVP and general manager for cloud platforms at Red Hat, in a blog post.
“These benefits range from modernising traditional applications to hybrid and multi-cloud implementations, as well as the development of new cloud-native applications for speed and agility.”
How Kasten can help agencies roll out cloud applications
One Australian government agency, which provides services to a huge number of citizens and can’t risk its applications going down for any length of time, was seeking to modernise its platform as part of a digital transformation initiative.
“Existing methodologies would not work for them,” says Kasten’s Mr Swalwell.
“This agency had lots of applications which are all connected. We were able to assist them with a Kubernetes-based solution which aligned with the DevOps lifecycle and provided for data protection and portability in different clouds.”
The Kasten by Veeam solution allowed the agency to automate its application roll out. It also allowed the agency to update its applications as needed without breaking dependencies. “We enabled fast roll out and recovery,” says Mr Swalwell.
The key to the solution is it allowed the agency to scale as needed.
“As more government agencies move cloud native applications into production and are used to run critical workloads, the methods used in the past can’t scale, which is where Kasten’s solutions come into play,” he said.
Why Day Two automation is critical
While application implementation gets the most attention, it’s what happens after the applications are deployed which is critical. These are known as Day Two operations.
“Day One is production, but it’s Day Two when you expand and change things,” says Mr Swalwell.
“You only install once, while Day Two is care, feeding and maintenance. Day Two, for an agency, is the reality of managing that software for the next 18 years.”
For the DevOps team, Day Two is where most of the cost and effort lies, he says. “We automate Day Two and we allow the developers to go back and do what they are employed to do, which is write new code and build the system.”
But the reality is many of these systems – such as the government agency mentioned earlier – are simply so big they’re beyond human scale. This means managing them is a major challenge, which is where Kasten’s automation offering comes into play.
Cloud systems are so big and complex, automation is the only way to get a handle on them and ensure they are running correctly and providing the services citizens rely on.
“We automate Day Two operations,” concluded Mr Swalwell. “We allow an agency or business to get on with its core mission, rather than having to spend time and effort on making sure everything is running correctly.
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