A DevOps Concerto in Paris with Alien4Cloud and Cloudify

In 1990, the French composer Jean Michel Jarre, staged one of the biggest concerts in La Defense Paris. He used the magnificent Grande Arche and three surrounding towers as projection screens, about 2 million people attended the event, and you could see them standing from La Defense to L’etoile – the famous Arc de Triomphe.
A few years later another concert was given at La Defense. It was much more modest but a very interesting one – a concerto for DevOps in the cloud. The conductor chosen for this task was Cloudify with Alien4Cloud, and Atos as its enabler. The concerto had three movements and a Grand Finale.

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First Movement: An Introduction by Victor Degbos of Atos

Victor demonstrated how the adoption of DevOps is a key enabler for enterprises in the digital world. DevOps enables agility, automation, and much more, but most of all, reduces deployment time and recovery, in case of failure. Victor also talked about the tools that Atos offers – a DevOps Academy, DevOps consulting, experts and much more.

Second Movement: Alien4Cloud – The DevOps Enabler by Gauvain Girault of Atos

Gauvain spoke about how Alien4Cloud, using Cloudify as it’s orchestrator, creates a consistent DevOps approach for the enterprise. Alien4Cloud was used from the architectural phase through the creation, and all available infrastructure in actual deployments in a self-service portal that enabled devs and ops to create their own apps while collaborating and sharing them with the organization.

The usage of TOSCA makes the Babel Tower of DevOps tools human readable and enforces some conformity and standards so that everyone in the enterprise, whether it is a developer or an ops person, able to understand the application design.
Alien4Cloud with Cloudify offers organizations a powerful tool that enables the developers freedom of creation, but gives the admin a full view of what is being done in the organization.

Third Movement: DevOps in the Real World by Vincent Hornain and Jean-Claude Michel of Société Générale

Vincent and Jean-Claude shared their experience working with Alien4Cloud and Cloudify, moving from traditional development to DevOps. In an Enterprise as large as Société Générale (~150K employees), this is not a simple task. You have to prove that your time to market will be faster, you will reduce the costs of every project, and you can adapt faster and more easily to any needs of the organization.
Add to this the reluctance of developers and operations to go with the changes in their roles. After recruitment of a small, highly skilled team, they had to choose which tool would be perfect for their needs.

The first tool they’ve tested was a sequential one, and pretty soon they found out that it was quite good for some tasks, but when you have large apps you need a tool that can describe not only the components of the app, but also the relationships between them, and for that you need a topology strategy – which they found in TOSCA. Once TOSCA was chosen they had to decide on the orchestrator that was the best fit. That was a much easier decision as they found that Alien4Cloud with Cloudify was simply the best tool in the market.
In less than a year, at the end of 2016, they moved to production with more than 70 apps, either new or legacy, that are already available to users and the TTM was reduced significantly.
They are now planning to use not only the private cloud they have, but also public clouds, and orchestrate everything with Alien4Cloud and Cloudify.

Grand Finale – Round Table With All Speakers and Nati Shalom, CTO of Cloudify

Rumor had it that the moderator of the round table prepared some questions before the show as he wasn’t sure the audience would ask questions. Well, he wasn’t at all ready for the surprise awaiting him.

Once the audience became a part of the show, the flood of questions kept coming and did not stop. It looked as if everyone in the room just wanted to know more and get their hands on a blueprint to start working with.
We got our hands on some on of the topics discussed in this round table and here they are:

• How do I convince management to make the move to a DevOps environment?
• What’s the role of operations in the world of DevOps?
• How does Alien4Cloud with Cloudify fit into the world of networking, virtual and physical?
• How can the IT admin monitor who is doing what and how?
• How can we convince people from Ops and Dev to become DevOps?

Finally the moderator had to stop the flood of questions as Lunch was waiting outside the hall.
At the end of the day, it wasn’t as fancy as the Jean Michel Jarre concert, and only one projector was used on a simple white wall, but still it was a beautiful concert for DevOps in the enterprise.