Why you shouldn’t ignore toolchain management in your cloud

While infrastructure itself is important, the tools and services that enable its management, collectively known as the toolchain, play an equally important role. This article explores the importance of a healthy toolchain and how to achieve it.

Why toolchain management matters

Toolchain management oversees and maintains the tools and technologies used to develop, deploy, and manage your IT infrastructure. It ensures that these tools are up-to-date, secure, and integrated to streamline operations and enhance overall resilience.

A well-planned toolchain is the cornerstone of a well-managed infrastructure and provides a number of benefits:

• Infrastructure planning and automation: Effective toolchain management enables you to plan, automate, and execute complex infrastructure tasks efficiently, which helps optimize resource utilization and reduce downtime.
• Security and compliance: It ensures that your infrastructure tools are updated regularly with the latest security patches and bug fixes, reducing the risk of vulnerabilities and helping you maintain compliance with industry regulations.
• Resilience and agility: A well-maintained toolchain can help your IT infrastructure adapt to changing business needs and respond quickly to disruptions.

Leverage partner expertise to optimize your toolchain

At Revolgy, we understand the importance of toolchain management and offer comprehensive services to help you optimize your cloud operations.

Our team of experts handles the various tools and services (such as kubectl, AWS CLI, gcloud CLI, and others) used to control and manage your infrastructure. This involves identifying the right tools, evaluating their capabilities and compatibility, and creating a comprehensive plan for integration and deployment.

“Our toolchain management greatly simplifies infrastructure upkeep. Clients are not afraid to upgrade K8s cluster versions, for example, since they are confident that no API version changes will break anything — it is continuously being taken care of. We provide a managed and up-to-date platform for our clients to deploy to.”

— Alex Gain, Senior Cloud Operations Engineer, Revolgy

We use dynamic cluster resource management via Karpenter (dynamic spot instances management) to automatically provision and scale Kubernetes clusters based on demand, saving on costs by using spot instances when possible.

We use tools like Helm and Renovate to automate the patching and upgrading of our customers’ service deployments (external DNS, keda, load-balancer-controller, etc). This helps to ensure that their infrastructure is always up-to-date and secure.

Renovate is used to maintain the highest level of toolchain health. It’s an open-source tool that automatically scans your infrastructure source code and identifies outdated dependencies and tools. Renovate then generates merge requests with the necessary updates, ensuring your toolchain remains up-to-date and secure.

We use Renovate to monitor the versions of our customers’ RDS databases and alert them when a new version is available. This helps ensure that their databases always run the latest security patches.

“By constantly updating the service deployments, we stay on top of existing CVEs, greatly decreasing attack surface against our clients’ infrastructures. If they deploy in-line vulnerabilities scanning into their deployment pipelines (we can advise on that as well), our joint efforts also ease the burden on clients’ SOC teams.”

— Alex Gain, Senior Cloud Operations Engineer, Revolgy

Partnering with Revolgy for toolchain management can provide several immediate and long-term benefits. We’ll work closely with you to understand your needs and develop a customized toolchain management plan that aligns with your business objectives.

Contact us today to learn how our toolchain management services can streamline your IT operations.

This article was written with the help of Revolgy’s experts in toolchain management: Tom Kryst, MSO Product Manager, and Alex Gain, Senior Cloud Operations Engineer.

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