Introduction:

The following blog has been written by TCS Agile Computing, Cloud & Edge Centre of Excellence (CoE) in collaboration with the Global SUSE GSI team. It examines the TCS Cognix Enterprise Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) solution with SUSE Rancher.

Background:

Businesses are adopting to the post-pandemic era and demonstrating certain inherent characteristics: agility, cloud first and cloud native approach to enabling enterprise operations. CIOs are making efforts to break away from monolithic IT design to ensure that the dynamic business demands could be met through scalable, modular solutions that are portable and that can be easily deployed. The adoption of technologies like containers is on the rise. They aid in easy deployment and portability for business applications. A Containers’ approach can comprise of the production environment, application workloads, and its dependencies, including hardware and middleware, all composed in one modular entity. The benefits of portability, improved availability, reduced server footprint, agility (time to market) and innovation clearly outweigh the complexity of technology and skill gap challenges. As per a CNCF survey 2021, 96% of the organizations are either using or evaluating Kubernetes which help manage containers, including deployment and automation. 55% of the participants are using containers in production in North America. The CNCF survey further calls out the year 2022 to be the watershed year to make containers the choice of deployment platform.

Cloud Native Adoption Challenges:

Organizations are still facing adoption challenges. The challenges can be broadly categorized into following:

• Technical Architecture decision: Integration, Architecture pattern, Balancing of feature priorities E.g., Automation, Workload portability, Cloud-Native DR, Configuration drift management, Coexistence of declarative and imperative configuration, Degree of commitment to deployment infrastructure (Cloud, On-prem)
• Solution Architecture decision: This includes the choice of products for orchestration, network choice, security, observability, etc
• Technical Debt: Existing legacy workload, 3^rd party products, Unsupported products, Hosting of non-compliant apps like SSL 1.0 apps, Older CICD technology
• Evolutionary Challenges: New network capabilities, new security paradigm, serverless patterns, SaaS adoption
• Technology Gap: Lack of support for opensource distributions and lack of OOB (Out-of-box) capabilities E.g., Multi-cluster management support for opensource Kubernetes, Multi-control plane Servicemesh, Support for Windows containers, Lack of robust edge deployment platform.

Business Challenges:

• Organizational Practices: Lack of Cost allocation practice in Data Center, Lack of standardization in tools (Observability, WAF), Distributed decision making for platform and tools, Ad-hoc request fulfillment, Organizational Silos, Lack of shift-left practices
• Skills Gap: Last but one other key challenge is a skills gap and developer onboarding

To illustrate how the above challenges have manifested in business, A multi-national Insurer in the UK was unable to migrate their Windows workload, A leading banker in US is focusing on supporting their multi-protocol workload with secure Servicemesh, and a leading retailer in the UK did not have the governance in place, and must realign the team, A leading bank in EMEA had started their cloud journey but found the costs unmanageable, A multi-national healthcare company in  Europe experienced over-provisioning due to lack of chargeback.

Incorrect decision-making can cost an organization tens of millions of dollars, more critically, it can be regressive to the transformation journey by many months or restrict technical capability.

To set up an enterprise-grade container platform, one must provide its characteristic features. The container platform requires integration with multiple tools for Observability, Storage and Backup and Restore, Disaster recovery, Network components, Security, Multi-cluster management, registry, and DevSecOps toolchain.

Figure 1 – Functional Layers of a Typical Container Platform

The impact of Platform build challenges manifests as below –

Solution Highlights:

TCS Cognix Enterprise CaaS is a holistic solution that enables to overcome adoption and operational challenges in a typical Kubernetes Platform by an Automation first approach right from platform provisioning to Operations. Cognix Enterprise CaaS leverages SUSE Rancher to help customers to provide their consumers a true Container-as-a-service consumption model inclusive of Security, DevSecOps and IaC capabilities across On-Prem, Private and Public Clouds. It comes with prebuilt integrations, OOB (out-of-box) configurations and is Hybrid-Cloud ready.

Cognix Enterprise CaaS powered by Machine First Delivery Model, accelerates Digital Transformation with pre-built Digital Solutions, Assessment Frameworks, Platform agnostic Architectures, Re-usable automation toolkits, focused on Industry specific use-cases.

Following are the highlights of TCS Cognix Enterprise CaaS Solution –

a. Consumer Friendly:

• Pay as you go: Project teams can consume the containers in seconds and be charged per hour basis.
• Flexibility: The platform allows to provision resources flexibly, E.g., in granular units of vCPU compared to what a typical public cloud provider can offer.
• Developers: An integrated pipeline helps the developers to focus on functionality development.
• Tester: Test environment can be provisioned on demand and scaled down to zero. Configuration drift tracked and reconciled to provide better experience.
• Business Users: User experience can be tracked using SLIs designed and trackable SLOs.
• ITOps: A service catalog driven approach, reduces the skill requirements for operations, and helps the team manage larger estate.

b.  Multiple Technology Choice for leverage:

c.  Integration with products to enable key features:

• For storage integration, the platform integrates with NetApp, which provides storage with high availability, Data Protection, Resiliency, Encryption, Backup, Migration and DR capabilities.

d.  Automation:

• Service Catalogue driven Day-2 operations provides the shift left push. ITOps activities are automated.
• Truly automated, the platform can be terminated and recreated within minutes.
• Follows GitOps principles across Compute, Storage, Network
• Provides continuous optimization hints, by tracking historical usage
• Provides customized dashboards for management of multiple clusters and workloads.

Key Features of CaaS Platform using Rancher

Benefits:

TCS Cognix Enterprise CaaS helps customers to provide their consumers a true Container-as-a-service consumption model providing portability of applications across many platforms, Business Resiliency, Technology Agility, Scalability, Security and Strategic Governance, leading to higher productivity and ease of management.

To summarize, TCS Cognix Enterprise CaaS is a secure Enterprise production grade automation first, resilient platform, which adapts to the consumer demand, and delivers IT in both in Cloud and On-prem.

Contact:

For more information on:

• TCS Cognitive Business Operations visit https://www.tcs.com/cognitive-business-operations
• TCS Cognix visit https://www.tcs.com/cognitive-business-operations/solutions/cognix-human-machine-ai-collaboration-business-suite

Email: agilecomputing.coe@tcs.com

Authors:

References:

• https://www.cncf.io/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/CNCF-AR_FINAL-edits-15.2.21.pdf
• https://www.cncf.io/announcements/2022/02/10/cncf-sees-record-kubernetes-and-container-adoption-in-2021-cloud-native-survey/