Environments form the foundation of any route to live.

Without them you can not develop or deploy code. In modern cloud infrastructure, cloud providers have a plethora of ways in which you can configure, provision and run your environments. These permutations around the set-up can get complex very quickly. Not getting your cloud environments strategy correct can lead to:

• Ineffective or Zero Automation -Manual provisioning subject to long build times and human error.
• Rising ARR Costs - If not controlled, teams could provision expensive services that will increase your running costs.
• Downtime - Poorly set up and configured infrastructure that is not fit for purpose, resulting in a poor user experience.
• Rigid and Inelastic Scaling - As your product and service gains popularity and usage increases, if your infrastructure can not scale, it could cause a poor customer experience.

The correct environment strategy with the supporting tooling and implementation can drastically speed up your Route to Live. Leveraging concepts such as infrastructure as code, cloud alerting & monitoring, and autoscaling could save your organisation time and money. ClearRoute engineers have extensive experience of the major cloud provider platforms and how to enable engineering teams to build and deploy software at pace.

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A global telecoms organisations previously worked with the ClearRotue team, seeing savings of over £1M per release. Re-engineering and re-platformed their services to enable automated releases globally.

For the majority of systems, we aim to have environments that are short lived and temporary in nature (Ephemeral). Also we wish to build a strategy that prevents change on an active systems without being rebuilt (Immutable). This results in a faster, more efficient Route to Live.

To enable this flexibility, you must have the tooling to provision, deploy, test and monitor your infrastructure. You can now achieve this with Infrastructure As Code, infrastructure testing libraries and cloud monitoring tools. With the flexibility that is available, it is crucial we introduce a new level of rigour and ensure our environments go through the same quality assurance as any application release (inclusive of Security, Data, Infrastructure and Ops). We must also consider the following as we move to this new automated and repeatable approach:

• Performance - Benchmark your services and the capacity the application can handle. Use this to feed into Service Level Indicators and Objectives (SLI/SLO).
• Reliability - Infrastructure ideally will be spread across multiple regions and availability zones. Even with this it is still important to have a plan if any services go down and test these situations.
• Scalability - Elastic environments will allow for dynamic scaling.
• Consistency - All environments will be identical in construct, with scaled down services based on the requirements.

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Benefits

Building automated and repeatable environments, brings exponential benefits that include:

• Optimisation of costs and reduction of ARR
• Re-usable templates for faster set up and provisioning
• Clear Documentation
• Testable Infrastructure
• Shift Left

How We Can Help?

ClearRoute has extensive enterprise experience, and we can help you navigate the complexities of designing and building cloud environments. We can help you define and implement the following in your organisation's cloud approach:

• Environment Strategy - Create an environment strategy that leverages your cloud provider's latest features and functionality. Bring more representative environments to your teams, stakeholders and customers faster. Using everything from Containers to Serverless Functions across MicroServices and Event-Driven architectures, we have the experience and expertise to design & build best-in-class environment strategies.
• IaC approach - By leveraging as code technologies, you will be able to fix production issues faster, build infrastructure once and use it in many places, and promote ephemeral and immutable infrastructure.
• Help drive operational performance through an SRE culture - Bring an engineering mindset into operations, allowing for a more outcome and value-focused way of working. We can help to lead by example, educate and implement the changes needed to adopt this progressive way of working.

Adopting a modern environment approach will accelerate delivery, bring stakeholders closer to the development process and improve the quality of releases. Without these modern techniques for environment provisioning, maintenance and monitoring, you will never truly harness the power of your cloud platform.

ClearRoute engineers have intimate knowledge of the major cloud providers and how to enable engineering teams to build and deploy software at pace. We saved a global telecoms organisation £1M per release as we re-engineered and re-platformed their services and released them globally.