From tech layoffs to hiring freezes, it’s no secret that the IT industry has been through a rollercoaster ride of changes these past few years. Recently, there’s been a broad-based misconception within the tech industry and across the public sector that the current restructuring we’re seeing across hyperscalers is indication of a decline in the use of cloud services.
This, however, is not the case. IT departments across the public and private sectors are still using cloud services and in large quantities. Many of the layoffs and the restructuring that we’re seeing across hyperscalers are a result of changes being made in other areas of their business, and as a “market correction” for over-hiring during the pandemic.
If anything, the use of cloud services from the large hyperscalers is increasing. And, according to Andy Grimes, emergent sales specialist for cloud services at Red Hat, one of the reasons why cloud services continue to be so in such demand across the federal government is the need for agencies to get out from underneath technical debt.
In an interview with TD SYNNEX’s GovIT Podcast, Grimes discussed the reasons why it’s essential that agencies migrate monolithic applications to the cloud, shared some of the challenges they face while doing so, and explained how open source solutions can make cloud migrations easier.
Overcoming technical debt through cloud migrations
Cost is usually top of mind for agencies when it comes to modernizing IT. In the past, before cloud services were available, the standard practice for agencies was to task a government contractor to develop one or more “purpose built” monolithic applications that would run on a mainframe or server in that agency’s data centers.
These monolithic applications were optimized to run on-prem, since there was no cloud alternative at the time. This required agencies to provision data centers, which involved buying storage solutions, servers, firewalls, routers, switches, and any other piece of “bare metal” needed for them to function.
Provisioning a data center can be a massive expense to the taxpayer. And, most agencies would over-provision to ensure that they could meet peak usage requirements. This often meant that agencies were only using a fraction of the hardware capacity that they invested in for these data centers—creating a large technical dept.
But how can agencies get rid of their technical debt? According to Grimes, agencies have to move away from the mentality of spending money on a large amount of hardware they will barely use and make the move to the cloud – where they only pay for what they use – in order to eliminate technical debt in the long run.
But just because these workloads and applications are moved to the cloud and modernized doesn’t mean they have to stay there. In fact, it’s actually sometimes more expensive to keep an application running in the cloud than it is to host it in a data center. As Grimes explains, for these applications, a move back to the data center could be in order, but only after they’ve been modernized and containerized in the cloud.
“There are aspects of [the cloud] that are expensive. I could run this in my data center cheaper than I do in the cloud. You can if you’re already cloud-native, and you’re out of your technical debt,” explained Grimes. “You’ve now created [a] cloud-native, horizontally scalable [application], and your data sets have been rationalized. You’ve done a lot of technical debt retirement and now you have the ability to stand up a data center.”
Why Open Source tools are essential
That middle step – the modernization and containerization of applications – is where today’s readily available cloud tools and open source software solutions are beneficial.
Different hyperscale cloud providers offer a range of open source tools and solutions designed to make the migration and usage of applications in their cloud solutions easier and more accessible for government agencies. This includes open source software applications and tools that can help with application development and application modernization.
According to Grimes, “A government agency’s mission is to deliver services back to stakeholders, constituents, [and] to consumers, and the more efficiently you could do that, the better. Open Source is a great way to start this process to break the dependencies on monolithic applications and those enterprise licensing agreements and things that tend to trap you in technical debt.”
This makes open source solutions an important part of the cloud migration process, since they can be leveraged to move applications into the cloud, and then more easily modernize and containerize them. And there is another massive benefit to open source applications and tools – practically everyone coming out of college IT programs today knows how to use them.
“Everybody in college is using [Open Source] because [it’s] free. You can throw a brick down the street in a college town and hit 20 people who know open source tools. Regardless of where government tends to deliver services from distributed locations, [they] need to be able to find people to [work with] these new applications,” said Grimes. “Using open source tools to develop cloud-native [applications], and being able to run them in cloud or on-prem is really valuable to those organizations because they can reduce their technical debt in the applications but also reduce their skill dependency.”
To learn more about public sector IT modernization strategies, click HERE.
