A changing landscape requires new processes
At the recent Symposium/ITxpo, Gartner shared a list of technologies and trends that will be important for organizations to embrace and prepare for in 2017. These trends, which are listed in the report, “Top Strategic Predictions for 2017 and Beyond: Surviving the Storm Winds of Digital Disruption,” reinforce the breadth of technology that IT must support, roll out and engage with. This includes everything from the 100 million consumers who will shop using augmented reality to dealing with the roughly 21 billion endpoints expected to be in use in 2020.
The report also demonstrates how fast technology changes directions. For example, Gartner predicts that in 2019, 20 percent of brands are expected to abandon their mobile apps. “Many brands are finding that the level of adoption, customer engagement and return on investment (ROI) delivered by their mobile applications are significantly less than the expectations that underpinned their app investment,” the report notes. However, this doesn’t mean less work. IT departments continuously have shift gears to support new processes, news apps and new technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and the massive amount of data that it produces.
The dynamic needs of today’s businesses are driving organizations to increasingly adopt new technologies and applications that oftentimes don’t play nice with the existing set of infrastructure and legacy systems in place. So, while it’s clear that the technology landscape is changing, what isn’t so obvious is how IT and business decision makers should be adapting to an industry that is in constant motion.
In-Steps DevOps
To keep up, IT must implement agile methodologies that can adapt quickly to market changes. The DevOps mentality is making its way into many organizations and involves the development team creating, building and evolving products to ensure the organization is up to date, while the operations team confirms everything is running smoothly prior to a launch going live. This level of checks and balances isn’t just a nice to have, it’s a necessity—one mistake and the entire system can be brought down. Fostering a greater level of collaboration between development and operations makes it possible to efficiently and effectively build, test and correct new features and new products.
While the shift to a more collaborative environment between the Dev and Ops teams can take time, using modern IT automation solutions can make this transition easier. Such solutions automate many of the routine—and even not so routine—elements of the application release process within DevOps. Many of the actions necessary to move from code to production—not to mention maintenance, testing and cleanup tasks—can be taken off the backs of developers and operations, saving them time so they can focus on higher-level projects and reduce manual errors.
Finding the Balance Between Speed and Accuracy
In 2012, Facebook announced it was increasing the speed at which it released code to twice a day, every day. As Chuck Rossi, director of Release Engineering at Facebook said, his team follows the advice “ship early and ship often.” Facebook continues to follow this model, and while the company certainly didn’t invent it, the model has caught on and is spreading among companies developing virtually every type of technology. The catch? It’s an incredibly time-intensive process and not every company has the resources necessary for a dedicated release team. Plus, a true shift to DevOps doesn’t happen overnight, especially since there is a ramp-up time for folks to get on board. For example, Phil Dibowitz, systems engineer at Facebook, told TechTarget that it “led its Chef team through a three-year process to rethink configuration management to scale on par with the web-scale company’s data centers.” This took three years, he said, “not because of the technological change, but because of the structural change.”
A slow transition to a new technology or new way of operating is a common occurrence because historically the production systems are cordoned off from development groups. While the Ops team has to ensure the rollout will meet certain standards, the Dev team wants to speed the process to begin the final rollout process as soon as possible. A happy medium exists, but if it isn’t found, things can go very wrong. Unfortunately, 2015 gave us two major examples of what can go wrong if products can’t speak to each other and rollouts are completed too early: Remember the New York Stock Exchange and United debacles?
Breaking Constraints Through Automation
This is where modern workload automation comes into play. Automation and solid change management allows IT to flexibly add on new technologies with automated processes for building, testing, upgrading and configuring IT—all while reducing the slack time between various steps. For instance, a workload automation solution should be able to trigger a build, deploy the build to the test environment, run the test suite and, assuming testing meets acceptable criteria, promote the build to production. If something does go wrong, necessary remediation can occur, and through monitoring and alerting capabilities, the required parties can be notified proactively.
Additionally, automation solutions with pre-built integrations make it easier for disparate applications to communicate, creating an end-to-end approach to workflow creation and maintenance. As a result, IT organizations can minimize the risk of business disruptions and achieve a more fluid technology delivery to the business.
Although it’s not a silver bullet that will solve all DevOps transition issues, automation does reduce manual intervention, which leads to fewer delays and errors and improves speed at which tasks are completed. However, beyond the technological aspects, there must be a clear understanding by both sides (the Dev and Ops group) on what their counterparts need—and this requires a high level of trust and coordination.
While the specifics around the DevOps methodology certainly will change, automation will remain a critical piece of the process. With IT automaton, DevOps teams are able to refocus on critical IT business and operational processes, thereby reducing delays, decreasing errors and improving the speed at which tasks are completed. Ultimately, automation makes it possible to increase the speed of product releases and enable companies to stay ahead in the age of unpredictable customer preferences and ever-changing technological developments.
About the Author / Mehul Amin
Mehul Amin, a 21-year veteran of Advanced Systems Concepts Inc. (ASCI), previously held roles as product engineer and technical support manager and played an integral part in building the company’s workload automation solution, ActiveBatch. In his current role as director of Engineering, Mehul drives high-profile initiatives and leads both the Product Engineering and Release Engineering teams. Mehul received a master’s in computer science from the Stevens Institute of Technology.