DevOps is the sizzling buzzword on the tip of nearly every tongue in the IT world and extending into the business domain. The promise of faster product delivery with improved quality and increased employee productivity in this neck-to-neck, hypercompetitive business era, is what’s fascinating IT and business leaders. Behind the buzz is a wave of successes with a range of organizations, from “unicorns” to “workhorses”, and startups to large enterprises. DevOps is now viewed as a major enabler of digital transformation, with the primary outcome to deliver improved customer value.
According to a leading technology firm, DevOps adoption has increased from 66 percent in 2015 to 74 percent in 2016 and among larger enterprises its adoption is even higher, at 81 percent. The latest numbers for 2017 indicate that 90 percent of organizations implemented, are currently implementing, or planning to implement DevOps. Market research specialists forecast that the global DevOps market will grow at a substantial 19% CAGR during 2016-2020 periods. But what’s truly exciting is the intersection of DevOps and cloud – particularly public cloud, which is an ideal platform for DevOps. Product teams, historically having innovation and execution throttled due to infrastructure, can now provision their own infrastructure on demand, using full automation.
This market growth has caused a surge in demand for cutting-edge DevOps solution providers. nClouds is one such organization, growing from a startup in 2012 to a credentialed, award-winning firm delivering technically innovative and successful solutions to a long list of clients.
nClouds is a DevOps and cloud consultancy and solution provider with deep expertise in modern infrastructures, particularly Amazon Web Services (AWS). They provide expert services for DevOps (continuous integration & continuous delivery pipelines, containers, microservices), managed services (cloud infrastructures, change management), cloud migration, plus world-class 24/7 support.
Starting with Technical Leadership at the Top
JT Giri is the CEO and Co-founder of nClouds. He’s an astute, technically-savvy entrepreneur who’s made it nClouds’ mission to help organizations create sustainable systems that empower the business to deliver innovation faster and predictably. Giri has deep and broad experience of more than a decade as a DevOps consultant, and previously held roles as a network engineer, systems architect, and systems admin. His expertise lies in cloud infrastructure, cloud platforms, agile methodologies, and popular tools and practices for continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD). Giri’s technical and analytical skills have assisted nClouds in solving complex problems for numerous Silicon Valley-based startups and enterprise organizations. And his vision, diligence and contagious passion for solving technical challenges have enabled him to build a highly-skilled and experienced team at nClouds, and an enviable list of exciting clients. Now, Giri and his team have made nClouds an indispensable DevOps and cloud partner in solving their clients’ toughest challenges.
Services that Enable Digital Transformation
nClouds understands the importance of infrastructure automation, high availability and a secure architecture for its clients in this fast-changing, tech-savvy world. They’ve crafted innovative techniques and processes, and built a proven track record of delivering comprehensive DevOps and cloud transformation solutions for businesses in various industries.
DevOps Consulting: nClouds works closely with client teams to build a DevOps culture that yields better collaboration among stakeholders and increased transparency and feedback across the software delivery lifecycle. This results in faster software delivery with fewer defects, and improved predictability. nClouds are experts at applying automation to software delivery to build, manage and support CI/CD pipelines, and design and execute container and microservices strategies. Their DevOps services have helped clients to improve idea-to-cash, sales velocity, customer experience, competitiveness – and have been credited with helping numerous startups build the innovation culture that helped them get acquired.
Managed Services: nClouds leverages the team’s experience and credentials to take care of their clients’ infrastructure needs so that clients can focus on their business, leveraging the advantages of on-demand, affordable infrastructure services to innovate faster and grow. nClouds builds, automates and manages cloud infrastructure, and implements change management processes, systems and service catalog management, as well. They are able to manage the entire IT infrastructure from alerts to server uptime and downtime.
nClouds also offers nOps, an award-winning SaaS offering for modern change management for cloud that features workflows, change management database (CMDB), service catalogs, and DevOps tools integrations. It was shaped directly by customers to help organizations go faster with control, manage cloud costs proactively, improve security and compliance, and prevent and remediate incidents. nOps gives teams instant visibility to change requests and any delta in their infrastructure. Customers use it to automate change authorization to handle most requests instantly, while customizing exception handling with easy-to-create workflows that can be integrated with DevOps tools like Slack, HipChat, and JIRA. nClouds calls it “change management at the speed of DevOps” since the tool achieves an improbable balance of control without sacrificing DevOps speed.
Cloud Migration: Migrating existing apps to cloud can be a tedious and complex task, and needs the right tools and skills. nClouds has a battery of experienced professionals to move applications to AWS for improved reliability and scalability. Based on the company’s experience with 250-plus AWS deployments, they can optimize the clients’ use of AWS to minimize cloud computing costs.
24×7 Support: The skilled and diligent support team at nClouds provides world-class technical support to its clients. The quality and value of this support can be gauged by the fact that 95% of nClouds’ consulting services clients utilize nClouds’ 24×7 support. nClouds can take full responsibility for their clients’ infrastructure performance with on-call, SLA-level support for DevOps pipelines and cloud infrastructure.
Fast Path to Achievements
Deep on technical skills, nClouds has earned certifications and competencies from Amazon, including AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, AWS Managed Service Partner, and AWS DevOps Competency. nClouds’ experience includes more than 10 years of DevOps automation and AWS implementations. To date it has 250-plus successful AWS DevOps implementations, over 500 deployed pipelines, and manages more than 10,000 servers for various clients.
Most recently nClouds was recognized as one of the “20 Most Promising DevOps Solution Providers – 2017” and “20 Most Promising ITSM Solution Providers – 2017,” by a leading business technology publication, representing the input of a distinguished panel of CEOs, CIOs, venture capitalists, industry analysts, and editors.
Along with all these achievements, nClouds is a member of the AWS Partner Network (APN), and teams with AWS on technical, business, and go-to-market initiatives.
Clients’ Perspectives on nClouds
nClouds has more than 100 enthusiastic clients, including some of the coolest companies in Silicon Valley. Their customer base spans the US, Europe and Asia, and includes startups and enterprises, alike. Its clients are delighted and satisfied with nClouds’ services, and include recognized brands like Avaya, Informatica, Sony (division), LendingHome, TuneIn, Prodea, and many more.
“The partnership with nClouds has helped TuneIn implement a DevOps culture. With that culture comes speed … it helps us innovate faster, helps us align groups and everyone’s marching to one goal. So, for us, it’s velocity.” – Jose Panlilio, Manager, Technical Operations, TuneIn
“I cannot say enough about the nClouds team. Their work and efforts are tremendous, and they take great care of our environment. In nClouds, we found the next level of innovation, experience and ability to adopt new technologies.” – Marc Goodell, VP Environments & Infrastructure, 6Connex
“nOps gives us instant visibility into changes in our AWS infrastructure. As we transitioned to a new, more secure and scalable AWS infrastructure designed by our nClouds team, nOps provided daily alerts about changes and identified issues that we needed to address as we prepared for millions more users. Now, we’ve integrated nOps into our workflows.” – Gabriel Adauto, Director of Engineering, Learning Games, Motion Math
Representative Client Results with nClouds
- Achieved 10x faster product delivery speed, from ideation to rolling-out new features (idea-to-cash).
- Migrated a major app from single-tenant, on-premises to multi-tenant, public cloud, reducing end-client on-boarding from months to hours.
- Created the ability for client’s Sales staff to self-provision test-drive environments for product offerings with a single click, improving customer and developer experience and accelerating sales velocity.
- Modernized traditional apps by adding self-healing, auto-scaling, and rolling deployment capabilities.
- Improved client and end-user confidence in iterative development, driven by innovation in quality and feedback.
- Helped create a blameless IT culture, enabled by feedback and consistency across development, test and production environments.
- Integrated security across the stack making it more than a checkbox.
- Identified nearly $1 million in annualized savings by implementing modern change management process.
The “Special Sauce” in nClouds’ Success
Building and feeding the right technical team. nClouds believes in hiring, retaining and incentivizing technical talent. An engineering-led organization, the company has assembled a highly-credentialed, deeply-skilled team with a diverse set of talents – engineers, architects, developers, SREs, sysadmins, and project managers among its think tank. The experienced team thrives on challenges from technically advanced projects, and is always motivated and energized to solve complex problems for clients.
Great clients and a collaborative engagement model. nClouds also credits its success to an exceptional group of clients, ranging from Silicon Valley-based startups to large enterprises. The common thread is that clients are looking to innovate faster and improve business agility. They see DevOps and cloud as integral to the solution, and trust nClouds’ experience. nClouds typically engages as an extension of the clients’ teams, with nClouds team members embedded and participating in client standups and connected via modern collaboration tools, like Slack. For most clients, nClouds provides front-line, 24/7 support for their DevOps and cloud infrastructure.
Sharing knowledge, applying best practices. nClouds has a passion for knowledge-sharing, with two main objectives: to grow skills continuously, and to capture and codify the team’s experience into reusable assets to achieve better efficiency, best practices, and client success. Skills development includes industry certifications, training, and a common knowledge database. Applied best practices include shared processes, methods, services, APIs, and tools. As an example, nOps, which is now available commercially from nClouds as a SaaS offering, started as an in-house change management tool developed and shared by nClouds services teams on client engagements.
Perspective on AWS Market
nClouds points to AWS’s incredible momentum, fueled by a decade of experience in complex, production cloud environments, massive customer base, and global partner network. All this makes a powerful ecosystem that is delivering unparalleled innovation and a continuous barrage of rich new AWS features, products and services. Services like Amazon ECS and EKS accelerate containerization, and AWS Step Functions, AWS Lambda, and Amazon API Gateway make it easy to build and maintain serverless deployments. For nClouds and their clients, it’s an exciting place to be.
What’s Next for nClouds
nClouds is continuing to make deep, technical know-how the focus of its business model. Credentials, competencies and reusable assets help scale the business, provide depth to source the best teams to tackle clients’ most complex challenges, and ensure the teams are leveraging best practices and efficiencies in delivering solutions. Based on market direction, the nClouds team sees huge opportunity in helping enterprise organizations migrate existing workloads to cloud, as well as in a continued focus on enabling digital transformation with DevOps and modern infrastructures.
Source :-The 10 Most Valuable AWS Solution Providers 2017
