Over the last few years, business needs for new applications and services have increased tremendously, resulting in a need to accelerate the application development process. Moreover, the process of development has changed radically. Development is fast-paced and needs continuous application updates, patching, enhancements, etc. These changes require development environments, quality assurance, continuous deployment, infrastructure, etc. That’s where EaaS comes in.
EaaS (Environment as Service) offers environments in the form of service so that you can easily manage all your environments efficiently and quickly. EaaS eliminates the application environment bottlenecks and enables faster innovation at scale. An environment consists of infrastructure, software, code, configuration, and all the runtime libraries required to run your application in an isolated environment.
Benefits to businesses using EaaS:
Here are some of the core benefits to businesses using EaaS:
Increased Efficiency of DevOps
DevOps is a critical part of modern application development. Replicating a production environment containing complex configuration, infrastructure components like load balancers, Kubernetes cluster, firewall, etc., takes a considerable amount of time and can lead to errors. Also, factor in the deviation in environments e.g., Staging is a replica of production, but data, infrastructure, and configuration will be slightly different. Automating the development environment takes a lot of burdens away from the DevOps and reduces the complexity of the DevOps process.
Having the ability to automate environments using an Environment as a Service platform, you can give your distributed teams the ability to spin up and decommission the environments as needed, accelerating time to market and faster ROI.
Increased Development Speed
EaaS improves your overall development speed and ability to market your product early. As you can quickly clone your environment and testing can be performed in isolation without interfering with other environments, you can quickly roll out your releases.
Reduced Cost
EaaS not only keeps checks on the cost related to environment setup and management but also helps you reduce the cost. Let’s find how:
Save valuable time spent on the manual setup of the environment. Note that the security and complexity when managing environments are also essential factors i.e., a Production environment is set up with a different security profile than a staging environment. EaaS helps you manage these complexities easily without spending too much time.
As the environments provided by EaaS are ephemerals, that means they can be created or deleted automatically for as long as you’re going to use them That way, you can achieve not only scalability but improved cost control.