IT Ops Teams Starting to Exert More Cloud Control

One of the more subtle things that has changed over the last year or so when it comes to cloud computing is how much more involved IT operations teams are these days. For that very reason cloud service providers such as ProfitBricks are starting to focus more on the IT operations experience.

ProfitBricks this week announced that it has added support for both the Ansible and Chef IT automation frameworks to its cloud service. That move comes on the heels of making available a command line interface at the end of last month.

Matt Baldwin, head architect for ProfitBricks, said that like a lot of cloud service providers ProfitBrick is making this shift because while application programming interfaces appeal to developers, IT operations teams want access to tools that enable them to management a cloud service consisting of infrastructure that spans multiple applications.

In fact, support for Ansible and Chef are only the first steps in that effort. Baldwin said ProfitBricks will soon add support for Puppet and Salt IT automation frameworks as well. Among the four, Baldwin noted that interest in Ansible is way up because it provides a way to automate services without having to install agent software everywhere.

Generally, the shift towards more influence being exercised by IT operations teams should be good for the channel. Developers tend to think in terms of single application instances. IT operations teams are looking for way to manage multiple applications and cloud service providers. The extent to which they can accomplish that using tools they know and are comfortable with; the more likely they are to favor one cloud computing service over another.

Baldwin also noted that IT operations teams tend to care a lot more about overall infrastructure performance issues such as disk I/O and the amount of network bandwidth available than developers, which are usually singularly focused on the performance of their application. As a result, the sales cycle when IT operations teams are involved is usually more exhaustive and perhaps even more drawn out.

All in all, Baldwin said the “Bring Your Own Cloud” era that was characterized by developers selecting their own clouds is giving way to a more mature approach to contracting for cloud services. For solution providers that generally don’t have great relationships with individual application developers that can only be construed as good news indeed.