Environment as a service (EaaS) refers to the provisioning of preconfigured computing environments or infrastructure components as a scalable and on-demand service. It’s basically a sandboxed virtual environment that contains all the configuration settings and dependencies needed for an application to run independently of hardware. It enables organizations to quickly set up, manage, and use computing environments, including servers, networks, storage, and software, without the need to invest in and maintain physical hardware or perform extensive configuration tasks.
Key Features of an EaaS
Now that you know what an EaaS is, let's explore the essential elements that make it a valuable solution for modern IT and cloud computing needs:
- On-demand access: EaaS allows users to request and access their desired computing environments or resources as needed, often through self-service portals or APIs. This rapid provisioning eliminates the traditional procurement and setup time associated with physical infrastructure.
- Scalability: Users can scale their environments up or down based on their requirements, ensuring that they have the right amount of resources at any given time. This flexibility is particularly useful for handling varying workloads and peak demand periods.
- Configuration management: EaaS often includes tools and services for configuring, managing, and customizing the environments to suit specific use cases. This may involve specifying the operating system, software packages, security settings, and more.
- Automation: Automation is a fundamental aspect of EaaS, allowing for the efficient deployment, scaling, and management of resources. DevOps practices and infrastructure as code (IaC) are commonly used in conjunction with EaaS to automate the setup and maintenance of environments.
- Cost efficiency: With EaaS, organizations can reduce capital expenditures on hardware and minimize operational costs associated with maintaining and upgrading infrastructure. They pay for only the resources they consume, making it cost-effective.
- Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud support: EaaS can be provided by various cloud service providers, allowing organizations to choose between public, private, or hybrid cloud solutions based on their needs and preferences.
- Collaboration and isolation: EaaS can facilitate collaboration by providing isolated and secure environments for different teams or projects within an organization. This isolation helps maintain security and prevents interference between environments.
- Disaster recovery and backup: EaaS often includes features for data backup, redundancy, and disaster recovery to ensure business continuity in case of system failures or data loss.
- Compliance and security: EaaS providers may offer compliance certifications and security measures to help organizations meet regulatory requirements and protect their data and applications.
How Are EaaS Environments Used?
EaaS is particularly valuable for development and testing, software development life cycles, continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, and other scenarios where agile and efficient resource management is essential. It empowers organizations to focus on their core business activities while leaving the management of infrastructure and environments to specialized service providers. EaaS environments can also be used for proof of concept or training and workforce development.
Why Is EaaS Valuable to Enterprises?
As the application development needs of the digital enterprise grow, so does the demand for testing environments. However, such environments can be time-consuming and complex to set up and costly to maintain.
Typically, IT leaders will delegate the creation of test environments to a cloud operations team. However, if the cloud operations team isn’t equipped to manage requests for access to the environment, the queue becomes overloaded and causes production bottlenecks.
If the problem persists, DevOps teams may try to spin up their own testing environments, a process known as “shadow IT.” Shadow environments without sufficient integrity and quality controls could create errors and delays of their own, as well as unmanaged costs.
Another approach is to delegate testing environments to the DevOps team. However, these teams may already be at capacity in handling core functions. Since testing environments can be complex, often integrating multiple other resources, the people managing them must be highly skilled. Without these skills on hand, a testing environment delivering inaccurate results or errors could cause more bottlenecks and delays.
Benefits of EaaS
Now let's take a look at the benefits an EaaS can bring to an organization:
For DevOps: DevOps engineers may find the EaaS model useful because it creates new environments with just a click, without the need for procurement processes or other delays. The speed of creating environments allows the team to focus on its core functions of developing and optimizing applications and user environments. Through customizations and customer input, EaaS environments can also help produce more accurate, thorough, and impactful test results, reducing errors and improving applications. For DevOps, the result is a faster, more efficient dev process and improved product releases.
For IT: EaaS relieves IT teams of the burden of managing test environments and their users, automating time-consuming tasks of setting up a new environment and managing its life cycle. EaaS pricing is also more transparent. Most importantly, EaaS environments do not compete with a production environment’s compute, storage, or network resources.
For the enterprise: EaaS helps reduce cloud costs over time and may even allow for a lighter IT HR and resource footprint. Other benefits include a faster dev cycle that can mean important time-to-market advantages, as well as reduced burden on HR to compete for scarce IT and DevOps talent.
Conclusion
To summarize, EaaS refers to the provisioning of everything required for a cloud-based application to run and deploy—including the configuration settings, computing, storage, networking, and user interface—as an on-demand, pay-as-you-go service.
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