Guide to Cloud Change Intelligence (CCI)
In this guide we detail everything you need to know to fully understand CCI, including limitations of native or legacy solutions, the main benefits of adding CCI to your cloud stack and guidance on picking a solution.
Cloud environments today evolve at blazing speeds, they are complex and inter-dependent. Frequent configuration changes shape these environments on an hourly, daily or weekly basis. Cloud teams struggle to predict the impact of changes at large. As a result, managing configuration changes are challenging during development, testing, deployment and operations. Troubleshooting cloud is taxing since root cause and impact radius analysis are difficult.
Cloud Change Intelligence (CCI) helps manage cloud configuration changes at scale. Agile cloud processes and technology enable CCI at organizations. CCI incorporates real-time contextual awareness throughout the lifecycle of cloud assets. This is key to understanding how cloud configuration changes impact cloud environments.
In pragmatic terms, adopting CCI helps your teams understand:
Because there’s no humanly possible way your cloud team cans keep up with the growing complexity of your cloud configuration.
Cloud configuration at scale is complex and will only become more complex over time. Cloud teams struggle to design, test, review, deploy and operate complicated cloud environments at scale. Even the best teams struggle with lack of visibility, context and effective tools to tackle cloud issues.
Some of the most senior and valuable talent spend most of their time trying to stitch together pieces of information provided by the cloud providers, observability, security and cost solutions to deliver simple tasks. Troubleshooting requires deep subject matter expertise and manual work in addition to a lack of collaborative solutions to bring all cloud teams together.
Think about the stressful processes your teams need to go through at each availability or security incident, and how many cycles get wasted fixing easily preventable mistakes in production, development and test environments.
CCI was born as a concept to offer a solution to these problems and more. CCI does this by democratizing access to infrastructure configuration and real-time data for the cloud. The core principle of CCI is to provide secure and flexible access to infrastructure configuration and real-time behavior data for the cloud. This includes:
With this new approach, your teams can save valuable cycles, foster ownership and collaborate more effectively.
Cloud environments today are magnitudes larger, more distributed, and more dynamic than on-premises environments. This scale brings complexity that outpaced the capacity of traditional tools. The result is the Cloud Execution Gap – where DevOps, SRE and SecOps teams lack the tools to efficiently detect, troubleshoot and optimize cloud environments, forcing them to work with different tools that silo data and slow them down.
Legacy and point solutions for cloud management often have limitations that can hinder their effectiveness in addressing the cost, availability, and security challenges created by configurations in modern cloud environments. These solutions are often designed for specific tasks or purposes, making them incapable of delivering a comprehensive and integrated view of the cloud infrastructure. Consequently, detecting and fixing cloud issues become troubling. Most of the legacy and point solutions use simplistic static code analysis techniques that look at the resource level and not the posture or lack critical environmental information. This lack of context causes engineers to spend unnecessary time on troubleshooting across multiple segregated tools with data silos. As an example, a change in the AWS cloud layer may impact PODs running inside your EKS cluster, most tools don’t take these dependencies into account.
In short, legacy cloud solutions are good at detecting specific incidents or conditions, but they lack:
Adopting a CCI platform delivers two main business benefits:
Reduced cloud risk
Reduced cost
You can read GigaOM CXO Decision Brief: Cloud Change Intelligence to get GigaOM’s take on CCI and how it can benefit your organization.
All teams that collaborate on cloud configuration changes can benefit from CCI throughout the lifecycle of cloud components.
During the design/planning/development phase of infrastructure as code, development teams can use the visibility capabilities to get a solid understanding of the running configuration in the targeted environment.
During the test/review phase of infrastructure as code, development, architecture and security teams can use simulation capabilities to introduce guard rails and speed up reviews, along with traceable records of reviews.
Once configuration changes are deployed, operational use cases come into play:
Lightlytics offers the world’s first CCI platform, so this is an easy choice. 😀
Jokes aside, here are capabilities to look for:
Adopting a CCI platform delivers two main business benefits:
Reduced cloud risk
Reduced cost
You can read the GigaOM CXO Decision Brief: Cloud Change Intelligence to get GigaOM’s take on CCI and how it can benefit your organization.
Lightlytics is the world’s first Cloud Change Intelligence Platform. Lightlytics provides a collaborative detection, troubleshooting and optimization solution for all teams who work on AWS configuration changes. These capabilities help cloud teams identify and fix root causes of incidents in minutes, investigate security incidents more efficiently, and troubleshoot cost for their environments.