Render, a provider of cloud services that automates DevOps processes, announced today it is adding the ability to automatically scale compute and memory resources up and down in real time as developers require.
In addition, the company has added a read replica capability for PostgreSQL databases that allows organizations that have heavy database or analytics requirements to offload processing to a real-time replica of their primary database that Render manages on their behalf. Render is making a case for a platform for building and deploying applications that doesn’t require developers to have any knowledge of the servers and infrastructure employed.
The Render platform eliminates the need to have DevOps teams altogether, says company CEO Anurag Goel. The Render platform instead creates a serverless platform that makes additional resources dynamically available as the development environment grows, he added.
“A lot of people that have DevOps jobs today will need to be reskilled,” Goel says.
Render claims the rate at which developers are creating new services on what it describes as a “zero DevOps” platform has doubled in the last six months, with hundreds of thousands of services being deployed.
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DevOps vs. IT Administrators
For the better part of the last decade a debate has raged between advocates of best DevOps practices that rely on programmatic tools to automate the management of IT and IT administrators that rely on IT service management (ITSM) platforms that allow them to manage IT environments without programming expertise. IT teams with DevOps skills are hard to find, so many organizations continue to rely on IT administrators that are both more plentiful and typically cost a lot less to hire and retain.
However, with the arrival of serverless computing platforms, the level of automation that can be achieved may mean that debate is increasingly becoming moot. As developers assume more responsibility for managing their applications, many of them are starting to embrace platforms that automate the management of IT infrastructure on their behalf without intervention from an IT operations team.
The Render platform then only charges developers based on their compute consumption to the second versus requiring organizations to commit to a specific size of virtual machine that they may not fully require.
It’s not clear to what degree organizations will embrace highly automated platforms such as Render. Most of the initial usage of Render involves greenfield applications. Organizations that have made major investments in IT operations teams continue to employ them to manage their legacy IT environments.
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Automating ITOps
One way or another, IT is becoming more automated because of serverless computing platforms and advances in artificial intelligence. The irony is that IT processes that today still require a lot of manual effort have been employed to automate everything except IT itself. In effect, that same level of automation is now being applied to the management of IT in a way that is arguably long overdue.
In theory at least, that shift will enable organizations to devote more time and effort to building and deploying applications versus managing the underlying infrastructure assuming, naturally, nothing ever goes wrong.
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