Cloud, infrastructure management, DevOps

Over the last few years, there has been spectacular growth in public and private cloud services (often provided by global giants: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud...).

The group's business lines have therefore evolved in step with this expansion of infrastructure solutions. So, in addition to their traditional architecture, which remains relevant for applications that have been in production for a long time, companies are increasingly relying on
different forms of cloud (public, private, hybrid, multi-cloud, SaaS, etc.).

The use cases for the public cloud have become clearer:
• for their new developments (“cloud native”), large accounts benefit from the functional richness of the dozens of services made available by the major players in the public cloud (e.g. managed databases), • start-ups and some technology companies, without any IT background
(and therefore “digital natives”), naturally prefer the public cloud, • applications with peak loads (e-commerce, video streaming, etc.) are also natural candidates for the public cloud, 
• development or test machines, with their limited loads (non-critical workloads) are suitable for pay-per-use in the public cloud, 
• an international presence encourages the use of global platforms, with data centers on all continents,
• more generally, it is tempting for any company to free itself from the physical management of infrastructures in order to no longer own them (Capex to Opex), with the prospect of reducing the size of the internal teams responsible for their management, in addition.

At the same time, corporate customers continue to automate their private clouds where the majority of their applications are located. Thus, in their latest generation private clouds (PaaS), they have access to services similar to those offered by the public cloud: largely automated resource allocation thanks to programming interfaces (API – Application Programming Interface ) and/or implementation of an integrated software suite that administers, monitors, controls and automates their various infrastructures (CMP – Cloud Management Platform).

Moreover, relying on high-performance public or private cloud solutions,companies that are constantly carrying out new developments (banks,insurance companies, platforms, etc.) are increasingly using DevOpschains (integrated development environments, software factories, continuous deployment, infrastructure automation, containers, selfservice,etc.).

Finally, Software as a Service (SaaS) applications from software publishers are becoming increasingly popular, as they transfer infrastructure management and security to the latter.

Group services
They accompany the expansion of the market's service offers.

i) Public cloud
Assistance with migration to the public cloud is a key area of activity. It includes different steps:

• detailed analysis of the application assets (and the possible eligibility of each application for the planned move). This long phase is essential: a transfer of virtual machines in their initial state would result in an
additional expense, without benefiting from the future context. Often, at this stage, old applications are removed and rewritten.

• preparation of the “landing area”, i.e. the new public environment that will host the transferred programs. Once the migration has been completed, customers then need to be assisted in controlling the billing applied to them by public cloud providers
(Finops). And, of course, to provide recurring managed services, even if the volume is much lower than in private clouds.

ii) Private cloud
The automation of private clouds also represents a significant part of the activity, with the following missions:

• automated deployments (Ansible, Terraform), APIs, Cloud Management Platforms,
• self-service (Python development, Go)
• design of virtual architectures with automatic and software-based allocation of datacenter resources (SDDC, SDN, SDS),
• integration of container-based solutions (Docker, Kubernetes).

In addition, the Group provides its own private clouds (total of around 15,000 active virtual servers, 80 petabytes of data, and 1,000 physical servers), which translates into:
• for customers: by an “all-inclusive” rent (hosting, use of servers and services);
• for the group: by renting space from a dozen hosting specialists (data centers), acquiring various equipment, implementing and managing virtual servers, optimizing productivity (using its proprietary platform management tool, for example) and securing them.

In this respect, the National Cybersecurity Agency of France (ANSII) has awarded the “SecNumCloud” qualification (granted to less than half a dozen service providers) to the cloud managed by the group's specialized
subsidiary, thus recognizing it as a “sovereign cloud” or “trusted cloud”.

The group's private clouds are also HDS (Health Data Hosting) approved.

iii) Specialized services
In addition to the above offers, on site or remotely, the group boasts all the profiles required for IT operations and production: pilots, operations analysts (support, piloting, preparation), production engineers, systems
engineers, production project managers, datacenter architects and PMO (Project Management Office) profiles. These specialists master Unix and Windows, the market's schedulers, supervision tools and backup tools. Good integration of the applications in operation (fine-tuning of processes and controls, documentation) and efficiency in change management remain the main key factors of success. Recurring infrastructure management is carried out in different ways:

stand-alone technical support (unitary or grouped), complete operation including project management and service level agreements. The services are carried out either on client sites or remotely, from the Group's service centers or in mixed mode, on site and remotely.

Infrastructure management:
• End-to-end supervision (application performances, systems, networks), production automation.
• Containers, DevOps tools.
• Design of data center architectures:  Software Defined Data Center (SDDC), Software Defined Network (SDN), Software Defined Storage (SDS), SAN/NAS, back-up, archiving.
• Implementation of APIs in order to perform infrastructure provisioning and developments related to infrastructure management. 

NEURONES' strenghts:

• Extensive experience in managed service contracts with a commitment to results. 
• Large-scale operation of its own private clouds. 
• Partnership with the main players in Cloud technologies (Azure, AWS, WMware, Docker, Kubernetes, etc.).