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Tag: business benefits

  • App Mobility Is the New Use Case

    App Mobility Is the New Use Case

    Selling increased investment in DevOps is not always easy. It takes time to implement, resource away from other projects and inevitably there is cash outlay. If not done carefully, it also appears to introduce chaos, something most of us in IT strive to avoid.

    But the benefits, at this point, are easy to document. Plenty of companies have tried and succeeded in moving to a more agile/DevOps approach to deployment. Yes, companies have failed, but the publicly acknowledged failures have also been dissected for lessons learned, which can help in your transformation.

    Every advice site suggests tying DevOps/digital transformation to business goals, which is a good idea, but is harder to do most of the time.

    Not any more. The truth is the future is mobile. Not as in mobile phones or cross platform (though both have a place in the future), but in the ability to run an app where it makes the most sense today with the knowledge that tomorrow there might be a better place to run it.

    Historically, the architectural choices of yesterday’s teams become a burden on today’s teams. I’ve worked at a major insurer where a mainframe flat file DB system was keeping an application from moving. I’ve worked at a power company where we were not allowed to modify a system running on OS/2 because no one quite knew how to maintain it. I’ve worked at an energy services company where I spent a year trying to re-create Novell IPX solutions in an Ethernet environment…The list goes on.

    What if we could avoid leaving such a legacy to future teams, and be more responsive to business needs/profitability in the future? That is, in a nutshell, what containers offer you. Today, you are running your app internally in a container management system. Tomorrow you’re running it on AWS in a container management system.

    There are things to watch out for–most vendor-sponsored container management makes it very easy to use containers on their platform of choice, but difficult to move containers. IBM, as one of the least intrusive examples, offers integration with their proprietary tools. Once you’ve taken those integrations, your mobility/options are more limited. As I mentioned, IBM is one of the more open companies out there. They offer value for tying you down, but if you don’t need those services, it’s better not to use them so you can move the application at will.

    Situations change, and containers allow for those changes. You may have a huge budget for external cloud apps today, but reasons ranging from internal cost decisions to regulatory changes could force your organization to reconsider options in just a few short months.

    That makes mobility important to business. So does cost management. No matter what the cheapest architecture to deploy on tomorrow is, wherever makes the most sense is going to be a hit.

    But how portable are they? Depends upon the app, and the implementation. An application that is developed as a group, able to run in a single pod (or multiple exact copies in multiple pods) is an easy thing to move about. One with containers spread across a variety of platforms, each doing what it is best at, will be more difficult to move. Persistent storage kind of guarantees that most enterprise apps have limited mobility–at least for the time being.

    Any app that can be moved to the cloud can be containerized first, granting mobility that means no need for massive conversion efforts if the cloud doesn’t work out. Any app pulled back from the cloud to the DC has the same potential, the issue of where the data lives is real no matter what architecture is chosen for implementation. But for any app that can be moved, it can be put into containers and moved far more easily in the future. For many apps, it is simply dropping it into the new environment and configuring networking to route traffic to the new location.

    We’re already going to leave future teams with a hodge-podge of databases, programming languages and networking tools such as WAF/load balancing. Let’s make life a little easier on them, and help increase the use of DevOps, by deploying with containers and targeting whatever makes sense for the org today, secure that tomorrow that can change and our burden will be less than it might have been.

    — Don Macvittie

  • Achieving Organizational Change Through Scaled DevOps

    Achieving Organizational Change Through Scaled DevOps

    The rapid pace of technological change has had a major impact on customer expectation, forcing IT decision-makers to adopt agile processes to ensure the continual delivery of innovation. This has led to the mass adoption of DevOps practices, with 77% of organizations indicating they rely on DevOps to deploy software, or plan to, in the near future.

    DevOps is a key ingredient for building and deploying better software faster. It enables developers to spend less time on onerous tasks and more time creating new features that drive competitive advantage and elevate customer experience.

    But, for DevOps to streamline organizational change, it can’t be a one-off initiative. Scaled DevOps requires aligning team members on common goals and best practices and establishing a DevOps maturity model tailored to a company’s individual needs. This is no easy lift and has led teams to abandon DevOps initiatives before they even get started. While the road to scaled DevOps can be daunting, the benefits can have a positive ripple effect across the organization.

    Business

    The business benefits that accompany DevOps are endless. Think: expanding your customer base, spearheading organizational readiness and achieving unmatched speed. As the consumer landscape continues to change, you will be able to adapt accordingly to generate new features and pathways to customers. Plus, DevOps provides a prime opportunity to get more information from your client base and relay it back to developers, equipping your organization with opportunities to learn from its failures and develop a company-wide, reflective model that better accommodates customer demands.

    Once your organization establishes a successful DevOps practice, it will be better prepared to take on other emerging trends and undergo a full-scale digital transformation. With DevOps as the catalyst for change, you can surpass competitors and disrupt the industry with innovative ideas, enabling you to stay ahead of the curve. Once an organization is fully committed to DevOps practices, the company will also enjoy a competitive advantage due to increased speed by empowering your business to provide customers with capabilities faster than rival industry players.

    Culture

    DevOps may require a daunting corporate culture makeover, but it also allows businesses to enjoy unbeatable cultural benefits by improving communication, establishing a foundation for continuous learning and boosting corporate morale with more meaningful work. When effective processes for communication are in place, employees can avoid the misunderstandings and missteps that often lead to failed initiatives and low morale. Once DevOps improves communication between teams, it sets the stage for more collaboration and cross-departmental education, allowing an organization to develop new operational efficiencies and empowering staff with highly specialized knowledge. With reduced inefficiencies, team members are empowered with more free time to create and meet new goals, plus budding talent from competitors will be drawn to your organization’s innovative environment.

    Operations

    Empowered by scaled DevOps, businesses will enjoy huge operational and technical rewards with automation, controlling costs and revamping security practices. Since establishing a DevOps practice requires the successful adoption of automation processes, a DevOps initiative includes the same key benefits that automation boasts by delivering the coveted digital experiences that consumers, employees and stakeholders demand. Automation not only meets these demands, but also sets the groundwork for a DevOps journey with CI/CD pipelines that automate software releases to rid your organization of manual release challenges.

    On the financial front, as your company moves toward a consumption-based economics model for things like public cloud, your DevOps practice will help control costs and environments by alleviating unused tools. In the long run, improved security will also prove profitable because there is no fiscal nightmare worse than a breach. Upon defining your DevOps model, compliance and control are not only maintained, but rapidly transformed through automated policies and configuration management.

    With knowledge of the transformational qualities that come with an effective DevOps approach, IT leaders are eager to adopt DevOps to improve efficiency, boost profitability, deliver superior customer experience and establish a culture of empowerment. However, they must understand that successful DevOps initiatives do not happen overnight. DevOps is reliant on continuous testing and education to ensure that companies can keep pace with their new collaborative culture, rapid delivery process and new technologies. Nevertheless, motivated by the promise of positive business, operational and cultural transformations, organizations will be more willing to prioritize the key credentials necessary to start, and maintain, an efficient DevOps practice.

    — Tim Curless