Unlocking Digital Transformation Through Cloud-Native Applications

Unlocking Digital Transformation Through Cloud-Native Applications MARKET TRENDS REPORT

Introduction Not long ago, the idea of digitally transforming legacy technology in a big way seemed far-fetched. The traditional on-premises, rack-andstack data center was too entrenched in how agencies worked and how they thought about IT. Yet in recent years, government has been moving away from the old-school data center and toward scalable architectures in the cloud.

But even as enthusiasm grows for modernization and more agile IT enterprises, digital modernization is not without its challenges.

Agencies must contend with integration of DevSecOps, microservices, cloud-native environments, multiple cloud environments and archaic government policies.

“Just because the cloud exists does not mean that government agencies are built to modernize and take advantage of innate opportunities that cloud provides,” said Brandon Gulla, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at SUSE RGS, an IT company that provides secure distributions of critical, open-source, cloudnative technology to the federal government.

To learn more about how agencies can move to a cloud-native environment, GovLoop teamed with SUSE RGS. This report looks at how agencies can use integrated cloud-native applications and processes to gain flexibility, scalability and adaptability needed to advance missions in fast-changing environments.

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By The Numbers

>75%

$4.3 billion

80%

at least 90%

of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production by 2022, up from less than 30% in 2020, predicts Gartner.

of enterprises, by the end of 2021, will be able to shift to cloud-centric digital infrastructure in half the time it took before the pandemic

$331.2 billion

is the amount of projected public cloud spending by 2022.

$8.2 billion is the expected size of the container market by 2025.

is the projected market for application container technologies in 2022.

of new enterprise apps will embed AI by 2025.

1.7 million

developers worldwide use Kubernetes.

“451 Research predicts cloudnative adoption will continue to grow and expand, fueled in part by its role as an accelerant to adjacent technologies and trends, including data and analytics, AI and machine learning, security, and IoT/edge computing – all of which play a role in facilitating digital transformation.”

UNLOCKING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION ADD TITLE THROUGH HERE CLOUD-NATIVE APPLICATIONS

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Old-School IT Holds Back Digital Transformation Challenge: The Fallacy of Lift & Shift

Solution: A Unified Cloud Ecosystem

IT modernization in the form of digital transformation is one of the most daunting challenges encountered by government agencies today. Challenges include:

The answer is loosening the tightly bound architectures of legacy systems and reconfiguring assets old and new into seamless multi- and hybrid cloud solutions.

• • • •

The scale and scope of digitization The interconnectedness of affected assets The upheaval of traditional IT processes and workflows Outdated security policies developed for legacy technologies

Moreover, agencies frequently lack in-house expertise and other resources needed to execute a smooth, large-scale digital transformation.

On the way to modernization, fallacies and challenges bedevil the journey. Most pervasive, perhaps, is the seductive notion that simply putting IT assets into the cloud somehow constitutes meaningful digital advancement. Attempting to modernize the enterprise by way of a “rip and replace” strategy is tempting. In practice, however, an incremental, evolutionary approach often yields better results.

“Just because you take a production-grade application that was traditionally deployed in a data center and you transport it into a cloud environment, that does not make it cloudnative. You’re not going to see many of the inherent benefits – elasticity, scalability and high availability – until you actually modernize the architecture beneath the layer, beneath the stack,” Gulla said.

“It’s much like taking an old barn car and putting a new coat of paint on it,” Gulla said. “Underneath the hood, you’re still going to have that same misfiring engine.”

Much of the challenge exists at the foundational level of legacy IT, notably tightly configured legacy architectures that weren’t built for flexibility and nimbleness. It’s not unusual to encounter tight coupling of services and components in legacy applications that are designed to only work with each other.

“Countless software architectures within the federal community right now are monolithic in design,” Gulla said.

“We’re seeing with cloud-native strategies and architectures that for scalability, you need to decouple facets of individual applications to work elastically in the cloud.”

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In this more dynamic environment, data and applications move and communicate easily across what would otherwise be disparate, low-accessibility environments. Using open-source tools and technology, such as Kubernetes, agencies can easily build and automate management of cloud-native applications.

The upshot is highly responsive, modernized IT enterprises that are better able to advance missions.

“At SUSE RGS, we extend all of the features of the traditional cloud and allow you to take advantage of those types of architectures, no matter if you’re running in a cloud, on your own hardware or in your own data center, all the way down to the tactical edge with a single board computer,” Gulla said.

Agencies tend to adopt cloud-native architectures in three waves, Gulla said.

“Pathfinder-type organizations in the intelligence community are eager to adopt ‘bleeding edge technology,’ including advanced DevSecOps initiatives such as Platform One (Air Force) and Black Pearl (Navy) that invigorate attainment of critical missions,” Gulla said.

Next to embrace cloud-native approaches are more traditional DoD shops. “Where open-source technologies provided the acceleration to cloud native, agencies are now looking for more of an enterprise approach to those cloudnative technologies,” Gulla said of this cohort.

Finally, more risk-averse civilian agencies are “looking at mature products for managed services and FedRAMP approval,” he said. “That’s where we’re starting to see more interest in cloud-native technologies.”

“It all begins when agencies embrace the modularity of software components,” Gulla said. “Agencies are seeing benefits of that in software architectures, and they’re starting to apply those same concepts to the organizational units or teams that are creating these applications. … They’re actually breeding a culture of innovation.”

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Best Practices in Digital Transformation With open-source tools and technologies, you can quickly build, deploy and manage containerized or cloudnative applications on hybrid cloud infrastructures. But there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. As you develop your transformation strategy, consider these options: • Use a set of common and consistent application programming interfaces (APIs) that can be shared between the public and private cloud platforms in your hybrid solution. Applications can then be developed using these APIs for deployment to either the private or public cloud environment, with the option of easily moving them between cloud platforms when required.

• Utilize hybrid cloud managers (HCMs) to create an extra level of abstraction and provide a unified dashboard for the cloud platforms, effectively masking the underlying cloud infrastructures and simplifying their use.

• Deploy an application delivery solution, also known as Platform as a Service (PaaS), to provide a further layer of abstraction. These are workload-centric solutions designed to handle all the heavy lifting involved in developing, deploying and automating the life-cycle management for cloud-native containerized applications.

• Implement a cloud application platform based on Cloud Foundry — using Kubernetes for orchestration and management — to develop cloud-native containerized applications; then deploy them on any platform within a hybrid cloud environment.

• Leverage an enterprise-class container management solution to more easily deploy, manage and scale container-based applications and services.

DIY Transformation?

Think Carefully …

Agencies take a do-it-yourself (DIY) mentality to many common IT projects. But digital transformation is not just another project. Before adopting a DIY approach, consider these potential pitfalls:

Lack of Skills • Do existing employees have the skills needed to leverage the latest technologies?

• If not, how well is your agency able to compete with the private sector for available talent – and how long would it take to bring on new employees to drive modernization efforts?

Lack of Resources • Will you be able to redeploy staff from current projects to focus on modernization?

• Does your staff have the tools needed to manage both the legacy environment and the emerging software-defined infrastructure?

The Hidden Costs of DIY • What are the costs of having to manage a whole new supply chain?

• What are the costs of system downtime, both in terms of lost productivity and disrupted services?

• How do you budget for other costs associated with system failures, such as repair services, replacement parts and lost data recovery?

UNLOCKING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION THROUGH CLOUD-NATIVE APPLICATIONS

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Could Cloud-Native Tech Transform DoD’s Satellite Fleet?

Kubernetes is going to space.

DoD needs a way to transform its satellite fleet to make it easier to maintain and update, and to adapt as requirements change. As part of an initiative called Satellite One, the military is looking at how DevSecOps and Kubernetes could enable the rapid delivery of software updates in space, paving the way for the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications.

Satellite One is leveraging Platform One’s continuous integration/continuous delivery pipeline alongside Kubernetes provisioning and deployment. The challenge is finding a solution that can work in such austere conditions.

There are two big problems, among others: • Space-ready hardware is costly, so DoD needs software that doesn’t need a lot of compute power.

As a result, DoD’s satellite fleets have not been able to take advantage of recent advances in AI/ML that have the potential to dramatically improve the processing of satellite imagery.

That’s where SUSE RGS’s K3s comes in. K3s was designed as a lightweight, compact version of Kubernetes that could run in remote, low-power, hostile environments. SUSE RGS is now working with Hypergiant Industries, which specializes in AIbased solutions, and the Platform One team to test the use of K3s on satellites.

“There isn’t another version of Kubernetes that can meet our use case. K3s has allowed us to build infrastructure suitable for use in space without the need to create our edge distribution,” said Bren Briggs, Director of DevOps and Cybersecurity at Hypergiant.

• On-orbit satellite software updates are often not possible or are incredibly time-consuming due to poor connectivity.

HOW S USE RGS HEL P S SUSE RGS delivers multi-cloud and hybrid cloud capability that unifies the entire cloud experience.

A single fabric allows agencies to access multiple clouds and services across the entire ecosystem.

SUSE RGS employs three pillars of excellence, including enterprise support for the Kubernetes stack that enables any infrastructure to serve up distributed computing, application hosting and orchestration at scale.

“Second, SUSE RGS delivers professional services to government agencies, such as the U.S. Air

Force’s DevSecOps pipeline, part of the Iron Bank Initiative under Platform One,” Gulla said.

Third, SUSE RGS ensures that operators in remote environments have the same robust IT capabilities and support that a commercial developer can build at a coffee shop on First and Main.

“We extend all the features of the traditional cloud and allow agencies to take advantage of those types of architectures, no matter if you’re running in a cloud on your own hardware or in your own data center,” Gulla said.

For more information: https://susergs.com

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Bringing it All Together For federal agencies, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments have become a fact of life.

Remember Cloud First? Here’s another fact: Simply being in the cloud isn’t good enough. Breaking free of on-premises legacy systems is a laudable goal, but it’s not the end goal. For government agencies, the cloud is one step of the journey toward digital transformation.

Without modularizing your IT stack and utilizing cloud-native, you can’t unlock the full potential of the cloud. Modernizing the enterprise in the cloud unlocks a raft of powerful IT capabilities, catalysts capable of speeding up mission attainment: scalability, flexibility, containers, decoupled functionality and advanced security functions.

Without some means of managing disparate clouds and applications, the ecosystem falters.

A B O U T SU S E RGS

ABOUT GOVLOOP

SUSE Rancher Government Solutions (RGS) is a leader in Linux and Kubernetes management for federal and U.S. government entities. RGS is independent, and its team is composed exclusively of U.S. citizens with a compelling history of delivering solutions in the public and private sectors for organizations adopting cloud computing, cloud-native development, and infrastructure and security operations. Fully committed to open source, RGS leverages SUSE’s Linux expertise and Rancher’s Kubernetes excellence to provide secure solutions that adhere to federal compliance regulations and support the adoption of SAP HANA, HPC, cloud, edge computing and Kubernetes container management strategies throughout the U.S. government.

GovLoop’s mission is to “connect government to improve government.” We aim to inspire public-sector professionals by serving as the knowledge network for government.

GovLoop connects more than 300,000 members, fostering cross-government collaboration, solving common problems and advancing government careers. GovLoop is headquartered in Washington, D.C., with a team of dedicated professionals who share a commitment to connect and improve government.

For more information about this report, please reach out to info@govloop.com.

www.susergs.com

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