Does your cloud platform feel like the Wild West? Do you have multiple admins running around wreaking havoc because you can’t keep tabs on them? Did you move to the cloud in order to free up creativity and allow product teams to spin up architecture quickly and easily only to find yourself in a position where you have no idea who built anything? Well, you’re not alone, and, the good news is, help is at hand. Enter the world of software defined operations or SDO. Now for those not indoctrinated into the world of SDO already, it may sound like some business jargon invented to keep people in jobs. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth — properly defined SDO actually reduces the need for head count and gets your business running like a well-oiled machine.
OK, think of it like this: You have a company policy that says, “All S3 content must be encrypted at rest” or “You must not open port 22 on servers.” You’re the manager and you individually tell every system administrator that they are not to create S3 buckets that aren’t encrypted and that they cannot open port 22 on servers. A month later, you check your S3 buckets and find 30% of them do not have encryption enabled, and most servers have port 22 open to the world. Sound familiar?