Introducing Accelero: EaaS for Accelerating DevOps on Public Cloud adoption

Having spent enough time with various companies improving their software delivery, we kept coming across the same problems over and over again. Every companies situation is unique, but for the most part the issues overlap. Over time you begin to see the patterns and similarities. We felt the need to devise a common solution to these common problems, so that the overlapping elements can be delivered in a more efficient and repeatable manner. With the time saved we can then concentrate on issues that provide more value for our clients and truly differentiate them from their competition.

These are problems that we’ve solved for our clients many, many times over:

• Clients want to leverage the public cloud using a DevOps model (automation, infrastructure as code, etc.)
• Clients want a Continuous Delivery pipeline to automate deployments and testing of their micro-services and container workloads.

DevOps transformation is certainly much more complicated than this, but the above are essential building blocks for companies who are looking to accelerate their software delivery time-to-market. To minimise the time we spend repeating these core activities  – and maximise the time we spend on our client’s more differentiated issues  – we developed an EaaS (Environment-As-A-Services) to fix these problems in a highly flexible and pluggable manner.

Accelero is an EaaS for accelerating DevOps and Continuous Delivery on public cloud. It is a solution for rapidly and repeatedly building cloud-based environments and CI/CD pipelines on-demand in a way that incorporates industry best practices for agility, operability, and security.

Most DevOps frameworks we’ve come across are often limiting and inflexible and end up getting in the way. We developed Accelero to overcome these issues, applying best-in-class open source tools such as Docker, Ansible and Terraform, together with technical approaches and best practices, in a modern, open, flexible and lightweight way.

We believe that Accelero can hugely accelerate any DevOps transformation on public cloud.

Design Principles Behind Accelero

The key principles during the development of Accelero were:

Avoid lock in: there is no lock in — Accelero is a thin wrapper around best open source tools such as Ansible, Packer, Terraform and Docker. It is not limiting in any way.

• Best-practice but flexible: it utilises the best open source tools, but if you prefer to use another tool, anything is pluggable and swappable. Think of it as a set of building blocks that you can mix and match
• Automated Infrastructure as Code: Accelero contains over 200,000 lines of infrastructure as code that is automated giving teams the ability to stand up environments and tear them down on demand
• Immutable infrastructure and containers: we make use of immutable server images and application containers to support consistent environments and application deployments for teams
• Secure by default: Every component of infrastructure deployed follows best practices to ensure it is highly secure and adheres to regulatory compliance standards for the healthcare (HIPAA), life science, finance and insurance (SOX & SOC), payments (PCI-DSS), and governmental industries (ISO 27001).

Why use Accelero to accelerate your DevOps journey?

Ultimately, Accelero supports rapid iteration of your entire infrastructure and software stack so that your teams can focus on creating software that differentiates your business, rather than configuring infrastructure; it’s your own personal EaaS. At the same time, the automated, repeatable nature of the solution means that infrastructure and engineering costs are minimised, quality is improved through the consistency of the on-demand environments, and deployment risk is decreased.

Lastly, your exact security and governance requirements can be baked into Accelero  – guaranteeing compliance, even at speed.

The Future

We’re very excited by the potential of Accelero in accelerating our clients’ projects and getting them to a highly optimised model for DevOps on public cloud within days, not months.

And we’re only just getting started, we’ll be publishing a post where we breakdown our roadmap and vision.

If you would like to learn more, please get in touch via info@accelero.io

Abubakar Mohammed, founder at AltoStack