There’s DevOps. And then there’s Big DevOps.
DevOps is a set of disciplines that accelerates time-to-value for digital deliverables. It is being embraced by all kinds of companies, from pure-play digital market disrupters to mainstream corporates trying to maintain competitive parity with their mobile apps.
Big DevOps is something else entirely. Big DevOps resembles mainstream DevOps, because it’s a process by which companies bring code to market. But if you’re a game developer or large bank, your code bases are massive—and your software life cycle requires you to distribute those massive code bases across globally dispersed dev and test teams.
Distribution of massive code bases on a global scale creates time-to-value challenges that are totally foreign to programmers checking bite-sized blocks of work in and out of GitHub. These scale-related distribution challenges chronically delay DevOps workflows—impeding your company’s digital agility and seriously undermining your ability to compete in today’s time-gated markets.
So you must overcome your Big DevOps code base distribution problem.
Choking on Code
The main culprit responsible for the slowness of Big DevOps is the network. It just takes too much time to push a massive code base through the relatively narrow pipe of an enterprise network. Even if you spend lots of money on bandwidth and network acceleration, the ratio between your bits of code and your bits-per-second of network is untenable. Every distribution of every large code artifact gets delayed. Over and over, day in and day out.
Those days add up. And when you pile days lost due to network-related delays on top of the other delays that plague large, complex software projects, you wind up persistently late to market.
And cloud alone can’t help you. Globally dispersed teams can’t work on a massive code base in the cloud. They have to work with it locally. So you have two problems. First, all your teams all over the world have to keep downloading and uploading massive files. Second, you have to make sure everything everybody does everywhere stays synced.
That’s why you need a much better way to globally distribute massive code bases.
Work Locally, Dedupe Globally
That better way is a hybrid hub-and-spoke model that lets you maintain a “gold copy” of your code base in the cloud—while giving everyone everywhere a local copy that is continuously updated with any changes to the current build. This approach eliminates network-related delays while ensuring conflict-free collaboration across geographically dispersed teams.
It’s a simple approach that works. In fact, it’s been used by CAD/CAM teams for years to address a very similar file distribution problem.
Hybrid cloud hub-and-spoke also saves money—because you can spend less on your network and your local storage infrastructure.
Cost, however, is not the existential issue facing Big DevOps. Time is. Companies that are slow to market with their digital deliverables can’t win against fast ones. So if your company is big—and if you’re doing Big DevOps—you have to solve your time-to-market problem. The realities of digital competition demand it.