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Building a Business Case for DevOps
You can get your DevOps vehicle as fast and fine-tuned as you like, but until you provide an effective business case to the board it will remain in the garage. To get the thumbs up, you have to prove your model is efficient and makes financial sense for the company as a whole.

Do You Need to Make a Business Case for DevOps?

Coherent business cases are needed for companies at various different stages of their DevOps journey, not just those at the very beginning. Ask yourself which one of these scenarios best suits your current situation:
1. You/your CIO know(s) the company needs to become more agile, but you don’t know how to quantify the benefits.
2. Your teams have started to implement DevOps practices locally and can see the benefits, but you don’t know how to quantify the success to sell it to management.
3. Your organization sees the success of DevOps pilots, but need to justify the investment to bring DevOps to an enterprise scale.
DevOps can represent a huge shakeup of the IT department that must be justified clearly and logically. The risk must be outweighed by the projected financial gain. Crucially, this needs to be quantified in language that finance department can relate to. It is referred to as the hurdle rate: the necessary annual or total return of a project to compensate for the risk.

What Should the Business Case Contain?
1. Executive briefing
2. Recommendations
3. Required decisions
4. Business drivers
5. Scope
6. Assumptions
7. Analysis
8. NPV (Net Present Value)
9. Strategic options
Hallmarks of a Successful DevOps Business Case

Agility

This is the main benefit of DevOps: the ability to deliver applications faster and allow for frequent changes and adoptions all the way into production. But how do we measure and quantify the benefits of agility?

Time Value of Money

The time value of money expresses the fact that money today is worth more than money tomorrow. The more you have to invest early (instead of over time) and the longer it takes to receive the return, the lower the present value of your investment.

The number you receive when calculating the present value of an investment (benefits minus costs) is called NPV (Net Present Value). It tells you what your future investment is worth today.

With agile and DevOps you are able to develop an application and deliver it to your end user in small chunks rather than in big ones; thus, you will improve the NPV (Net Present Value) of your project even if the total amount of investment and output are the same.

Delivering software continuously rather than yearly creates benefits in the same way as receiving interest on your savings account every day rather than just once a year.

The precise time value of money depends on the average cost of capital a company has to bear. For example, a large, publicly traded company has a lower cost of capital than a small, privately owned one. Your finance department will know it.

Cost of Waste

A second aspect, which speaks for agility in a quantifiable manner, is the reduction of waste.

Functionality delivered using non-agile software engineering practices may be irrelevant or outdated once it reaches the end user because of the time gap and mismatches in requirements and expectations. The cost of such waste can be reduced drastically by using DevOps.

Calculate the benefit of waste reduction using available statistics on the average percentage of functionality used without changes in your applications. It may pay off to assess this number for the last two or three releases delivered.

Take into consideration:
1. Total cost of development and delivery of these releases.
2. Relative efforts of different functionalities delivered by release.
3. Cost of change requests that arrived during and after the release date.
4. End-user survey on the need and usability of these functionalities.
Combine the benefit of waste reduction and of frequent delivery and add them as positive future cash flows to your calculation.

You also need to calculate the forecasted costs of your DevOps initiative. Consider:
1. Investment in build, test, deploy and provisioning and related operating expenses.
2. Investment in IT infrastructure.
3. Investment to complement skills in development and operations teams.
4. Investment in organizational changes.
5. Operating expenses for all above.
6. Extra cost of non-automated activities in test, release and deploy due to increased release velocity.
As part of your strategic options in the business case, balance your investments in automation with investments in more resources for build, test and deploy for given agility scenarios. The higher the release velocity, the more build, test and deploy activities are required. The more automation, the less of these activities must be done manually. Visualize in diagrams how the investment in more automation starts to pay off with increasing release velocity.

Finally, sum up positive and negative cash flows and use your company’s hurdle rate to calculate your NPV.

About the Author/Michael Schmidt

Michael Schmidt heads DevOps Practice at Automic, a management and technology advisory service established to help Automic customers to prepare for and transform their organizations toward DevOps. Michael spent his carrier as consultant, entrepreneur and in several product-related leadership positions. He has a passion for building lean IT organizations. Michael holds a joint MBA from New York University, London School of Economics and HEC Paris and a Master of Computing Science.
March 11, 2016
Top 5 Reasons to Back Up Your OpenStack Environment
I am a big fan of lists. If you recall the movie “High Fidelity,” John Cusack’s character Rob and his co-workers—armed with an encyclopedic knowledge of all things musical—compile “top five” lists for every conceivable occasion, openly mock the tastes of people, and, every so often, sell a few records. In the spirit of a lists, here are the top five reasons to back up your OpenStack environment. We thought that it would be helpful to many.

If you’re currently working with OpenStack clouds, or are in the process of embracing it, you need to include backup and recovery for OpenStack on your list of to-dos from the start. You may ask, “Why? I have orchestrated/automated everything, I just need to spin resources up and down.” Cloud environments are fundamentally different from the virtualization we have become used to. Virtualization relies on infrastructure for resiliency. In the cloud, distributed applications are responsible for their own resiliency, and are independent of the underlying infrastructure. Therefore, cloud apps need backup and recovery options, lest you face a complete machine, data or file meltdown.

We’ve compiled the top five reasons to backup your OpenStack environment. Take a read and it will become clear why you must include backup in your OpenStack plans.
1. Compliance — Compliance may seem like an issue for only certain industries—finance and health care come to mind—but nearly every organization has to deal with compliance issues. For some, it’s compliance to external regulations, while for others it’s simply complying with internal policies and best practices. Backup for OpenStack is an essential component for compliance; it ensures the availability of the data at a specific point in time within your OpenStack applications. I was recently involved in a dialogue/string on LinkedIn watching experienced OpenStackers go back and forth debating “pet vs. cattle.” “I am getting tired of it,” one person said. “This is cloud. It’s about scaling up and out … With automation and orchestration there is no need for cattle.” This conversation went on for days. Theory is great. Practice is reality. What people failed to discuss is that compliance or the business units will drive many requirements (such as backup) either today or tomorrow. End of story.
2. DevOps — Backup is often the forgotten tool for DevOps. Containers are great to use, but the ability to test with real data is an issue. The reason to use backup is quite simple: test and development. With a copy of a production environment, you now can test upgrades and new features in your agile development process. Furthermore, if you lose a machine or your data, or you end up with corrupted files while in the middle of testing or development, your life will be much easier if you have an appropriate backup solution in place. Restoring machines, data and files is a better option than re-creating them entirely. Cookbooks and recipes are great as well, but you still need to couple it with the appropriate “ingredients.” It is like playing with a fake kitchen as a child … do you want to make breakfast with plastic pancakes and toast? Nothing beats the real thing. Yes, more resources are required for one over the other, but when something goes wrong—it is unfortunate—people point fingers.
3. Disaster recovery plans — While the terms “backup” and “disaster recovery” often are used interchangeably, they are actually not the same thing. You might have what appears to be a great recovery environment (ideally one that mirrors your production environment for high availability), but without a comprehensive backup solution, your recovery might not be the painless experience you expect it to be. Perhaps the solution for intelligent disaster recovery is to marry backup with a Swift environment so you can recover from any point in time, anywhere in your organization.
4. Save time — Often recovery can be a frantic process, driven by a business need to have the machine, data or files recovered as soon as possible. Or, more likely, sooner than possible. If you are trying to re-create something under that type of environment, there’s a likelihood that mistakes could be made. This becomes increasingly true the more complex and mature your cloud becomes (think about the growing number of workloads and applications). A much easier approach—one that provides you with peace of mind—is to have a comprehensive backup solution ready and available for when you need it. There’s also another reason backup can save you time: When you have to re-create the lost information, you are taking your time away from something else—and that means you are taking a big hit to your productivity. Save yourself and your organization a big headache with backup.
5. Security and forensics — You never know when you are going to be asked to provide data or files related to a security issue or a forensics investigation. The right backup solution not only makes it easier to assist with the activity, but think how good you’ll look by being able to deliver the information the forensics team needs quickly.
Are you currently looking into backup solutions for OpenStack? Now that you know why you need backup for OpenStack, learn more about how to backup OpenStack.
March 10, 2016
Flash Mob Inflection: Rugged DevOps Revolution

Truthfully, I was never a huge fan of the HBO series “The Sopranos.” It’s not that it wasn’t entertaining; I just didn’t agree with the “best ever” label that so many espoused during the show’s halcyon days.

This had something to do with living in Hoboken, N.J., at the time and feeling the show was a heavily glamorized caricature of the real-life Mafioso I still perceived to be in my midst. More specifically, it’s hard for anything mob-related to stand up next to “Goodfellas” and “The Godfather”—among my favorite films, ever.

Either way, I currently find myself identifying with the series’ defining sentiment (copped directly from The Godfather, but hammered home as The Sopranos main theme): “Just when I thought I was out … they pull me back in.”

It wasn’t that I assumed that I’d never delve back into the domain of IT security after transitioning into the DevOps market last year; leveraging DevOps methodologies to improve security, policy compliance and related workflows stands as a core element of the overall movement.

But, in recent months and weeks it has become increasingly obvious that the security facet of the larger DevOps revolution appears poised for explosion as the buzz around emerging best practices, business models and solutions providers grows from a low hum into a steady roar.

After spending a few days talking DevOps security with Derek Weeks of Sonatype at CA World ’15 (we were booth neighbors and dinner mates) and giving more consideration to his company’s angle on securing the systems development life cycle (SDLC) supply chain, the internal gears really got spinning.

Regardless of whether you buy into Sonatype’s security-heavy approach, the concept of aggressively and proactively addressing security across the DevOps spectrum makes infinite sense. The ultimate downfall of applications security has always been the challenge of securing all the underlying layers of code (and today, microservices), especially as applications are assembled using heavier doses of shared, open source componentry.

As further evidence, nearly every major solutions vendor focused on the DevOps space—whether oriented toward the vibrant application performance management (APM), configuration management and continuous testing segments, among many others—seems to have launched some initiative aimed at integrating security into their products.

The rise of security capabilities adjacent to—and supporting inclusion into—the DevOps world, such as container giant Docker’s Content Trust initiative, along with the advancement of related startups including Twistlock, Scalock and StackRoxs, offers more proof of this growing momentum. And that’s only the container security piece of the puzzle.

Of course, there are also a number of emerging startups aimed at addressing the DevOps security opportunity, backed by well-known venture capitalists. A shortlist might include providers such as Immunio, Prevoty and UpGuard (formerly known as ScriptRock, which recently rebranded itself under the guise of a “DevOps security” provider), and we’re sure to see many more. And don’t forget the growing emphasis on DevOps security among established security industry stalwarts such as CyberArk, Snort and Tripwire, among others.

For a comprehensive list of the various types of DevOps security best practices and tools that we should expect to see gain wider adoption, this October 2015 blog by noted security analyst Adrian Lane of Securosis serves as a basic framework. Each of the areas of focus that he cites clearly offers significant opportunity for both new and existing methodologies.

Finally, one need look no further than this year’s RSA Security Conference, to be held in San Francisco at this end of this month, as tacit proof of the continued growth of what people now varyingly refer to as DevSecOps or Rugged DevOps (I prefer the latter as it just sounds cooler).

In addition to multiple conference sessions, notably a “DevOps Throwdown” between security industry veterans Caleb Sima, Chris Wysopal and Gary McGraw, there’s also the 2nd Annual DevOps Connect: Rugged DevOps Edition. If last year’s event is any indication (standing room only, venue literally at max capacity), this daylong DevOps security track at RSA will be an even more high-profile element of the entire week.

Further, if DevOps security—or, at the very least, the growing focus on adjacent segments such as container security—isn’t the unofficial theme of this year’s entire RSA show, I’d be extremely surprised.

Meanwhile (self-serving), my employer CA Technologies absolutely has a lot going on that complements and contributes to this growing DevOps Security market momentum.

For all of those reasons, here I find myself again, drawn closer back into the security space that I’ve called home for roughly the last decade. I guess that’s just how it goes, as DevOps and security are inarguably two of the most significant trends in IT these days and inextricably linked at their respective cores.

There are definitely worse fates out there. But, just when you think you’re out …

February 19, 2016
Carving through the hype – take the DevOps maturity assessment

As anyone who spends time with their family over the holidays can attest, the notion of maturity is a highly subjective concept.

Whether it’s sizing up the next generation’s advancement or defaulting to time-honored inter-sibling behaviors, annual get-togethers offer tangible proof of what’s new and those things that likely won’t ever change.

In the domain of DevOps – an umbrella concept that encompasses a massive array of processes and supporting capabilities – gauging the maturity of your organization’s standing is also a highly interpretive task.

Given that “DevOps” means something different to nearly every organization, based on its unique makeup, methodologies, tools, and most importantly, business goals, attempting to measure progress against any outside model may seem an effort of limited value.

That said, as an increasing number of organizations seek to embrace DevOps, and growing recognition that well-worn stories of leading-edge “unicorns” don’t relate closely to most people’s real-world expectations, many teams are left wondering where their own efforts stand, especially in comparison to their peers.

To help acquit this pursuit, and allow organizations to scope their progress, CA recently launched the second iteration of its online DevOps Assessment.

Split into three short surveys covering core limbs of the DevOps tree – “Develop and Test”, “Release and Deploy”, and “Manage and Monitor” – this free tool offers detailed insight into how your organization’s maturity stacks up to that of other practitioners.

For instance, in the domain of development, how well do your teams fare in defining and managing requirements, and then presenting them to others in a structured manner? Related to release cycles, are your teams truly meeting business-driven expectations for more frequent application deployments, shorter lead times, and higher success rates? Or, when it comes to applications monitoring, are you able to distinguish the most critical and recurrent problems and how they truly impact business services?

These are perhaps some of the most fundamental questions that one could apply to measurement of DevOps adoption in general, but further investigation attempts to take a closer look at more finite, underlying issues.

Are your development teams accurately replicating realistic conditions from production systems to create virtual services and testing scenarios? Are your application release deployments fully automated across development, test and production environments? Can your teams monitor complete business services that link user experience, transactions and applications to infrastructure to pinpoint any root cause issues?

The best thing about the survey is that it immediately provides visibility into how your answers compare to those of previous respondents. There’s no fuzzy math or editorial interpretation (though we may highlight trends in a report at some point), merely instant validation, and the option to create a customized report card charting where your efforts stand in relation to those of your peers.

If you’re wondering precisely just how to achieve your long-term DevOps goals comparative to where you stand today, it might even be worth leveraging some of the involved questions for the purpose of evolving process and methodology.

The only remaining questions are: Do you think that you’re ahead of the curve? Are you afraid to find out just how far you’re behind the crowd? And most importantly, what do you have to lose?

Take the survey today and get a real-world fix on your overall level of DevOps maturity. Guaranteed it’s a far more informative activity than debating family and friends over whose turn it is to carve the turkey, or wash the dishes.

December 3, 2015
Digital Disrupters – Building a DevOps Leadership Profile
While the advancement of DevOps methodology remains fairly nascent for many organizations, an ever-expanding class of leading practitioners are evolving a wide range of related best practices.

Beyond the well-worn concept of “unicorns” – the scant few organizations that stand as mythical examples of DevOps nirvana – this broader set of early adopters have begun to pull back the curtain on their efforts, lending further detail to the strategies that have bred this current model for success.

Last week, industry analysts Freeform Dynamics published valuable research that highlights the ongoing work of such DevOps innovators, dubbed as “Digital Disrupters” for their accomplishments in pursuing larger digital transformation. The report “Exploiting the Software Advantage” – sponsored by CA Technologies, outlines a critical set of initiatives crucial to navigating the DevOps landscape.

What are the specific hallmarks of those organizations leading the charge? Where are others struggling to catch-up? Many of the Freeform Dynamics survey results, based on 1442 respondents, reaffirm widespread DevOps observations, while other findings serve to shed new light, including:
- Everyone builds software: Perception is, in fact, reality and to deeply engrain digital transformation, Digital Disruptors are increasingly identifying with this mantra. While 95% of leaders have committed to becoming more app-centric, only 51% of mainstream organizations have adopted this persona. Similarly, 84% of Disruptors directly identify as “software companies”, regardless of industry, compared to 40% among the masses.
- Transformation is required: This point may seem obvious, but it certainly bears repeating. A whopping 92% of leaders have actively moved to break down traditional silos between Dev and Ops, with 51% of those organizations having already completed this work. By comparison, only 18% of mainstream organizations claim to have done the same, supported by 59% who at least share this more collaborative DevOps vision.
- Commitment is critical: This may also seem like a no-brainer, but the numbers bear out this requirement. Some 77% of Disruptors have agile development methodologies in place, with 70% having “broadly” implemented DevOps activities. For mainstream organizations, these metrics rate at only 31% and 21%, respectively; leaders are going all-in and appreciating the benefits, and those that follow will need to do the same.
- Experimentation is omnipresent: To garner the benefits of continuous delivery, embracing trial and error is a must. Among Disruptors, 93% recognized the need to “experiment and fail quickly on the road to success”, compared to only 58% of mainstream organizations. Some 95% of leaders have already shifted from fixed product cycles to continuous innovation, while only 56% of the mainstream have made this leap.
- APIs are everywhere: Ubiquitous integration, both in-house and in connecting to third parties, has only increased emphasis on the API. Disruptors are resoundingly focused on API management, with 68% using APIs to integrate third party services into their applications, and 66% to offer external access to systems and data. Mainstream peers compare at only 26% and 24%, respectively, denoting a sizable API management gap.
These are only a handful of the most dramatic and obvious areas where DevOps advocates have clearly re-architected their approach, separating themselves from those organizations that have yet to go all-in; it doesn’t stop there.

As highlighted in the research, other areas of differentiation and dichotomy include cross-functional alignment, emphasis on digital channels, use of digital to drive core business efficiency, and even funding of digital investments.

Beyond these key philosophical milestones that litter the pathway to DevOps success, the survey also highlights the vast array of strategic goals that these organizations have sought to accomplish. The results spotlight the massive range of significant business benefits that practitioners believe DevOps can deliver.

Leading use cases include:
- Improved customer satisfaction (49%)
- Better workforce productivity (44%)
- Improved customer experience (41%)
- Improved competitive differentiation (38%)
- Better agility / speed-to-market (37%)
- Opening up of new markets (35%)
- Creation of new business models (30%)
- Creation of new routes to market (26%)
If one were to take those outcomes out of context, unrelated to the impact of DevOps, it’s fair to say that they read like a generic list of leading business initiatives – further underlining the movement’s overall relevance.

That’s not to say this is all accomplished easily. Report respondents detail hard won victories that required significant time and investment to achieve all this DevOps-driven advancement. After all, the notion of “disruption” doesn’t exactly evoke images of ease or comfort.

Click here to read the report for yourself – there’s a lot more to be considered. Namely, how well your organization measures up in affecting digital transformation in its own right, and where it can take steps to move forward.
October 14, 2015
Native Integration of APM Driving DevOps Maturity

With applications performance monitoring established as one of the fundamental cornerstones of today’s DevOps methodologies, it’s easy to overlook the reality that effective instrumentation of such tools remains extremely difficult. Specifically, the biggest challenge remains creating performance metrics that address both IT and larger business initiatives.

There’s no question that APM is one of the most widely adopted and deeply embedded elements in today’s DevOps world, serving as the critical source of measurement that enables more transparent and agile applications. Yet, despite the fact that performance monitoring solutions, and their respective providers, are considered to be among the most mature on the DevOps landscape, customers still struggle to optimize the systems to meet their specific requirements.

However, as the market continues to advance, specifically via direct integration of widely-adopted APM tools with other strategic applications management systems, such as e-commerce platforms, organizations are finding a faster path to success, and bigger-picture DevOps benefits. One such partnership, announced in late August, saw market leader New Relic expanding integration with e-commerce platform provider Magento, owned by eBay.

Jon Azrielant, director of marketing at online retailer Jewelry.com, a Magento customer, said that his company initially ran into significant obstacles in adapting New Relic’s APM capabilities to its processes, despite the comparative strength of the tools.

“We had a really difficult time implementing New Relic initially, it was a painful process,” Azrielant said.

While the APM tools provided Jewelry.com with the data necessary to generate vital alerts, along with more agile sysadmin and operations monitoring, the more silo-based, fragmented approach that it employed could not empower the retailer to circumvent traditional walls between apps support and service support teams, Azrielant said.

Leveraging the extension of New Relic’s Software Analytics Cloud within Magento, the company has created more advanced instrumentation to inform critical business decisions. Among the most helpful of these measurements are those relating directly to customer experiences, while correlation of such metrics with Jewelry.com’s bottom line has also advanced executive decision-making, he said.

“The critical result of this integration is more complete visibility across applications and business performance, importantly tied to the actual business ramifications,” said Doug McIver, director of product for Magento. “In the past, merchants had to do a lot of difficult integration to use these systems together, so obviously this is a hugely valuable capability for us to be able to offer, especially to customers with highly performant site requirements.”

Moreover, Magento claims that it is growing its own customer base by tying APM more closely to its platform. Likewise, New Relic officials concede that to help advance crucial DevOps workflows, it must partner with such platforms to deliver APM data within the context of business requirements.

“If we’re talking about how to win in world where we’re iterating the end users’ experience on a regular basis, we have to put performance metrics within context of the UI, and the business results; working from the same data sets and getting people on the same page is incredibly important,” said Abner Germanow, senior director of solutions marketing at New Relic.

While pure performance stats are “near and dear” to New Relic for obvious reasons, the solutions provider is also attempting to advance a broader array of information that drives closer collaboration through new “iteration and experimentation”. New Relic is also focused on further developing the specific types of information most critical to key constituents such as e-commerce platform users. The need to create a common language for those DevOps efforts is amplified by the fact that development and operations officials are often unsure which metrics are critical to the business, and vice versa.

“Instrumenting code has always been a challenge, and we’ve worked very hard to ease that pain across a lot of different platforms; there’s always another language where work can be done, and we look to our customers to help lead us into the next phase of instrumentation,” Germanow said. “We’re seeing a lot of pressure around the need for constant change and iteration in industries where it’s truly a matter of survival, such as e-commerce, publishing, digital governance and finance – places where the industry is behaving very differently now than it has over the last 50 years.”

This work, and the subsequent APM integrations offered via platform providers such as Magento, have allowed end user organizations to remain focused on customer experience and sales, the ultimate goal of DevOps, said Jewelry.com’s Azrielant.

“In terms of how this relates to the DevOps revolution, this is the advancement that is bringing everything together and allowing everyone to look at the same numbers, to share common APIs, to streamline reporting and event response, and define everything in uniform terms,” Azrielant said. “Ostensibly, the most basic tenet of DevOps centers around the unification of these disciplines, and you can’t support that without the unification of this information.”

September 29, 2015
Five mistakes enterprises make while implementing automation

Automation, if done right, can add a ton of value to an IT organization. Benefits include speed, quality, and improved productivity. But only a few IT organizations have been able to truly reap the benefits of it. Why is that? What is it that these successful companies do differently while others continue to struggle?

Here are 5 of the most common mistakes we see when organizations try to implement automation.

1. Automating Infrequent Activities

Automation works best when a manual task is well defined, predictable, and highly repetitive. The first two dimensions are key in determining if an activity can be automated. The third helps determine if it is worth automating. Yet when organizations decide to automate, they focus on the first two and rarely consider the third.

For example, automating code builds is a popular activity to automate. It clearly meets the first two dimensions. But if the project plan only calls for monthly builds…what is the point? At best all you have done is saved the developers a few hours of work. However, if the same automation is used for projects that require daily / weekly code builds. Now you are literally eliminating hours of work. Translate that to annual effort saved and you end up moving the needle.

2. Automating In Silos

Hand offs are the silent killers of efficiency. However, most IT organizations are arranged as a series of hand offs (silos) – from requirement to development to testing to operations. And like most silos, the focus is inward, resulting in optimized silos but sub optimized end to end process. No wonder it takes weeks to get a new code through all the way to production with, in many cases, sub-par quality.

The true value of automation kicks in when you stich various activities into a single process, that minimizes / eliminates hand offs, and orchestrates it across silos. In essence, you are not just automating the activities but also automating the hand offs. This in essence, is the heart of the entire DevOps movement. To break down the silos, re-engineer, and automate the process.

3. Forgetting To Reengineer the Process

If you look at the data, most processes follow the classic 80/20 rule. 20% of the process time is spent on performing actual “work”, 80% of the time is wasted on motion. Case in point…it used to take us days (sometime weeks) to open up a simple IP port. The actual time to perform the work takes only about 5 – 10 mins, however getting the work to the SME literally took days (creating tickets, routing, approvals, finding SMEs etc.).

Despite this fact, many organizations spend countless hours finding, agonizing, and optimizing the “perfect” tool (hint: there is’nt one) and spend little to no time on process. In essence, if all you to is focus on the tool, then all you have done is optimize the 20%. No wonder organizations scratch their heads when they put in automation and don’t get the expected results. Automation and process reengineering are like two sides of a coin. If you are truly looking to transform, you cannot have one without another.

4. Not Planning For The Long Tail Of Automation

Pssst…let me tell you a secret. Creating automation scripts is easy…. after all it is the sexy part of automation. The real heavy lifting begins once you have created it and now you have to constantly tweak and maintain it.

Applications and its components, for better or for worse, are constantly changing. Which means that the scripts have to be constantly tweaked. Yet few consider the after math. In fact, our clients have so many scripts that they simply don’t know what to do with it. A better solution is to plan for the long tail ahead of time, set up a governance model that is responsible for updating, maintaining, and pruning the scripts and in turn protecting the investment that they have already made.

5. Fear That Automation Will Take Their Work Away

Fact – many of our clients are leery about automation. Not because they feel it will not work, but are afraid that it will work too well. And that success will eventually lead to good people losing their jobs.

There are three key issues with this line of thinking. First, the assumption is simply incorrect. While automation will eliminate certain types of tasks it also creates new type of work. After all you need someone to manage the automation. Second, the genie is already out of the bottle. Automation is here to stay. Ignoring it will only make catching up to it harder. And third, not implementing automation may have the exact opposite effect and speed up unemployment. Look at Netflix (poster child for automation) vs. BlockBuster. A better strategy is to start small now, while the industry is still trying to figure it out, and try to get ahead of the curve.

Mustafa Kapadia is the Service Line Leader for IBM’s DevOps practice, a business advisory practice focused on helping large enterprises transform their software & application delivery. He has over 17+ years of experience in the tech. space, both as a service provider and a management consultant.

His expertise is in DevOps, cloud, lean, application development, outsourcing, offshoring etc. and has published several articles on DevOps. He lives in San Francisco Bay Area, is an avid blogger (when time permits), a speaker, and advisor to start ups.

You can follow Mustafa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kapadiamustafa and Twitter: https://twitter.com/mkapadiatweets

July 21, 2015
DevOps Leadership Series: Gov Does DevOps

This past week, I had the opportunity to catch up with some more industry thought leaders at the DevOpsDays DC event in our nation’s capital. This was the first major DevOps Days event to feature a large audience of government participants. It was an awesome event and is certainly going to be on my must-attend list for next year.

First off for the series, I had the chance to chat with Nathen Harvey, the Community Director at Chef. Nathen also did a great job leading the organizing committee for DevOps Days DC.

In this episode of the DevOps Leadership Series, Nathen illustrates some recurrent topics he noticed at DevOpsDays DC. Nathen ensures us that government is ready for DevOps, enterprises are ready for DevOps, and small businesses and web innovators are ready for DevOps. Then he highlights how we need to create high velocity organizations that are safe, scalable, and humane for our teams.

https://youtu.be/hdUl8-d1za4

Next, I had the pleasure of catching up with Greg Elin, the Executive Director at GovReady and former Chief Data Officer at the FCC. What really stood out to Greg at the event was how many people already have their DevOps “sea legs.” He notes the number of different organizations that are comfortable with DevOps, and are familiar with its language and concepts.

https://youtu.be/XoZ4PGIAZx4

Finally, I caught up with Dave Johnson, Senior Technical Director at Ansible. Dave shares that “the market really is not dominated yet by any particular player in this (DevOps) space.” Dave explains when he first entered the industry he thought the IT world was dominated by open source and commercial technologies. However, when talking to the industry at large now, he found most the enterprises aren’t yet doing anything yet for automation, and most enterprises are still tackling their problems with humans.

https://youtu.be/ky51j1-fNsU

Next up in the series, you’ll hear from John Willis (Co-Author of the upcoming DevOps Cookbook) and Leon Fayer (Vice President at OmniTI).

If you have missed any of the other videos from this series, you can find them here. (We’re up to 15 so far).

June 22, 2015
DevOps Leadership Series: Gov Does DevOps (Part 2)

During my second day at DevOpsDays DC, I had the opportunity to catch up with a couple more industry thought leaders. First up, John Willis, (@botchagalupe) DevOps Days core organizer and co-author the upcoming “DevOps Cookbook”.

In this episode of DevOps Leadership Series, John highlights his first introduction to DevOps and the journey it has taken him on, and what about the current state of DevOps makes him excited. He says DevOps is really happening everywhere. Today large organizations and CIO’s of government agencies are now experimenting with DevOps at all stages. He references legacy companies that do not necessarily have “aggressive IT”, and how they now want to share their DevOps experiences.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jU1O2bCU_hc

After that, I had the chance to chat with Leon Fayer, (@papa_fire) Vice President at OmniTI, following his DevOps Days DC presentation. Leon illustrates the things he found most interesting from the DevOpsDays Conference. He noted that a lot of people have started to pay attention to the monetary strategies, and how to monitor from top-to-bottom in a DevOps fashion. Leon was happy to see that people are now more generally interested in how to generate and collect data more accurately to solve their problems.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx4Y3P3Njro

June 17, 2015
Follow the Unicorn: Transform your Enterprise Applications

For those of us that work on Enterprise Systems such as the mainframe, the claims that the Unicorns⁽¹⁾ make, can be pretty astounding. Dozens and sometimes hundreds of releases a day from big companies like Netflix ⁽²⁾ and Etsy ⁽³⁾ are hard to comprehend. But look a little closer and you can see that the key difference is in the way changes are released to customers, not so much the total volume of changes. A traditional enterprise application may have thousands of changes made over the course of 3 to 6 months, but all of those changes are released at once. The Unicorns are typically able to release a very small number of changes at a time because they can develop, build, test, and deploy these changes very efficiently. Small batch releases to customers has significant value. It enables you to get feedback very quickly, and it is significantly easier to verify because the change is not mixed in with other changes.

So how can you transform your development environment to deliver small batch of changes? I like to tackle the problem like any other computer science problem, no doubt because of my background. Break the large problem into a set of smaller problems and then solve those smaller, less daunting problems:

Step 0: Start with a Proof of Concept

Pick a Proof of Concept (PoC) to begin with that is important, but not mission critical. The PoC can be used as a learning ground and hopefully as a template for subsequent PoC’s. Make sure you have a team that culturally is willing to transform. Often the hardest issues to tackle have nothing to do with technology, but are cultural.

Step 1: Understand your Application

You need to have a good understanding of what your application consists of. Not only does the source code make up the application, but what source files are used, what the middleware configuration might be, what scripts you may have to build and deploy the application, and what data files (e.g. flat files, databases) that you use are also important. Some of these components may be shared with other applications, so you need to understand those dependencies as well. Once you have a good handle on the application, you can then automate the application build and deployment process so that all members of the team can work efficiently.

Step 2: Understand your test cases

If you can build and deploy the application quickly but it still takes days or weeks to test, then testing prevents you from delivering to your clients. An important shift for testing needs to be from testing the entire application to testing the change. You need to focus on running the right tests to ensure the change is correct and causes no regressions. Tests that do not exercise the code change are irrelevant and can be skipped. For many existing applications, the test suites may consist of hundreds if not thousands of test cases. Many of those test cases may be duplicates or testing areas of the code that are not being changed.

Step 3: Understand your processes

How fast can you get your updates to your customer? If your bug fixes and enhancements have to sit on the shelf for days, weeks or months before the customer gets them, they will not be satisfied. Streamline not only the development processes but the operations processes in your organization.

To know more about the topic with the help of a real life case, watch the replay of a recent webcast which IBM in partnership with devopsy.kinsta.cloud hosted with Canada Mortgage Housing Corporation’s Jeff Blackadar on how breaking down IT silos helped speed up mainframe development for them.

Also, do let me know your thoughts on the blog and on the topic.

¹ the born on the web technology teams

² http ://www.slideshare.net/jedberg/devops-at-netflix-reinvent

³ http ://www.slideshare.net/beamrider9/continuous-deployment-at-etsy-a-tale-of-two-approaches

About the Author/ Mike Fulton

A IBM Distinguished Engineer, CTO Enterprise DevOps at IBM, Mike is a software development professional specializing in compilers, debuggers, profilers and virtual machines. At IBM, Mike works towards understanding and influencing trends and directions in Enterprise IT delivering new technologies into the DevOps Portfolio. He also overlooks integration of the DevOps Portfolio into IBM and Enterprise Software Solutions. Mike is an IBM Master Inventor with several patents to his credit.

He is an avid blogger and regularly writes on his blog site – makingdevelopersliveseasier.wordpress.com

June 10, 2015