7 Cloud Headaches Developers Can Avoid with XL JetPack

Finally sold on the promises of cost reductions and flexibility gains, your organization is investing in and embracing a cloud solution for its application portfolio. Your team has known for a while that moving to the cloud is necessary, but you’ve been waiting with bated breath, also knowing that large-scale cloud migrations are typically bumpy flights.

For Development teams, cloud migrations can be time-consuming processes that require a ton of additional scripting and configuration work outside their typical skillset. This double-edged sword takes developers away from their business-value adding activities––writing application code––and introduces the Pandora’s box of errors that comes with manual scripting. To further complicate matters, these developers need to make sure they meet compliance requirements and address security concerns.

So, what’s the common thread in these chaotic cloud practices? It’s pretty simple. Most organizations just don’t have cloud expertise in-house, or the cloud expertise they do have is nearly impossible to replicate across all their teams.

Enter XL JetPack, the solution that gives Development teams everything they need to deploy their apps to the cloud in 15 minutes or less. XL JetPack ensures that all of the steps needed to quickly and securely launch apps from concept to cloud happen automatically, freeing developers from getting mired in manual work, so they can deliver valuable features faster.

Sound like something that might help your team? Here are seven things developers will no longer have to worry about when using XL JetPack.

1. Writing and maintaining complex scripts

Deploying a cloud instance, whether to Development, Test, UAT, or Production, requires a complex configuration that is hard to manage across environments. To fill in the gaps, Development teams need to write and maintain scripts to tie their plumbing, pipelines, and infrastructure together. With XL JetPack, you can eliminate this scripting and reduce duplicate work to put the focus back on writing awesome functionality.

2. Orchestrating release tasks

With so many important things happening in product launches and releases, it’s crucial that the right steps happen in the right order, with the right information propagated to the right places, and that all of it gets logged. But do developers really want to worry about all of that?

At XebiaLabs, our “as code” philosophy goes beyond environments and infrastructure to include everything teams need to execute fast, repeatable releases. XL JetPack leverages the DevOps as Code approach, enabling developers to tie their release processes into standardized delivery pipelines and kick off releases instantly from their CI pipelines.

3. Creating a different deployment plan for every platform or cloud

With XL JetPack, you can set your navigation coordinates before you blast off, via defined deployment packages that you can store in source control with application code. From there, Development teams can follow a tested, repeatable process to deploy applications from Development to Test to UAT to Production environments.

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4. Being an expert in cloud technologies and requirements

The level of expertise needed to launch new apps or migrate apps from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud isn’t easy to come by. Development teams that haven’t had a chance to build deep cloud knowledge find it hard to adapt their apps and design cloud-based architecture in a way that scales for long-term, enterprise-level storage, bandwidth, and security requirements. Yet so many are in that exact position.

XL JetPack comes with blueprints––which create immediately-usable release templates and deployment plans for cloud-based resources, based on application-specific parameters. With blueprints, teams get best-practice scaffolding, correct cloud configurations, proven reusable processes, and inter-tool coordination, all ready to go. You can also customize a blueprint to make it your own and share with other teams.

5. Getting bogged down by a GUI

There’s an importance to graphical user interfaces, especially in massive enterprise settings. A sleek, user-friendly GUI provides a common way for all stakeholders, regardless of technical competency, to access and interpret the information they need to perform in their role. But for the more technical of the bunch, this “one-size-fits-all” approach just feels like additional work.

With a more intimate and technical knowledge of the systems they’re working in, developers don’t need or want the handholding that comes with a GUI. Simply put, most developers would prefer to work directly on the command line rather than clicking through multiple screens.

With XL JetPack’s Command Line Interface, releases can be managed in just a few keystrokes. Using the CLI, developers can invoke blueprints and start releases and deployments. They can also import and export configurations, release templates, and deployment information for a fast spin-up of complete release pipelines and cloud deployments.

6. Giving up their favorite tools

Have no fear, developers. With XL JetPack, you can continue to work in the tools and in the ways you prefer.

XL JetPack integrates all your tools, like Jenkins, Ansible, and CloudFormation––across the pipeline, all the way from Development to Production––without any manual scripting. These tools get quickly harnessed into a defined process that provides Development teams controlled, self-service resources.

7. Meeting security & compliance requirements… and showing it

XL JetPack ensures that Development teams don’t have to figure out how to implement security testing or satisfy compliance requirements by themselves. XebiaLabs standardizes security processes, making satisfying security requirements a “non-event.” Configurations for connecting to code evaluation tools, release pipelines that incorporate manual and automated security checks, and dashboards for monitoring the results can be defined as code ahead of time.

Reporting and compliance requirements are also automated, so that they just happen, with no interruptions or extra work for developers.

XL JetPack keeps the Compliance team off your back, providing chain-of-custody reporting with all the details needed to meet enterprise audit requirements, without extra coding or meetings. And best of all, everything is logged in a form that’s easy for Audit and Compliance teams to use directly, so they have a full-fledged seat at the DevOps table.

Blast off

Enterprises across all industries are attracted to the cloud for its potential to help them cut costs and deliver value faster. But teams doing the hands-on work of migrating apps to the cloud know the roadblocks well: time wasted writing scripts to configure infrastructure and connect pipelines, missed compliance and security requirements as delivery accelerates, and a lack of cloud expertise on their teams.

XL JetPack gives Development teams everything they need to push their apps to Production in the cloud––all in under 15 minutes. With XL JetPack, your team can:

Push apps to Production in the cloud in 15 minutes or less with all the right settings and codified best-practices.
Get hands-free, connected pipelines that work with your preferred tools and link your pipelines from Dev to Production––without scripting.
Improve collaboration and visibility with pipeline views and status for all release flows, release relationships, and risk views.
Automate compliance, security, and, audit tracking, so that the correct steps are taken and requirements just happen, with no interruptions and no extra work.

Get a free trial of XL JetPack and see how fast and secure moving apps to the cloud can be!