CA Technologies further advanced its staged goal of unifying its disparate portfolio of DevOps automation tools by announcing today a new release of CA Workload Automation AE (AutoSys) software now directly integrated with the CA Automic One Automation platform the company acquired early last year.
CA AutoSys is the older of two offerings and is positioned by CA Technologies as being able to support more complex workloads running on a larger number of platforms, including mainframes. CA Automic One Automation was acquired to bolster the automation capabilities CA can offer optimized for distributed computing environments.
Gwyn Clay, vice president of product management for CA Automic, said it’s no secret CA Technologies has multiple automation engines. The long-term goal is to enable organizations to employ any mix of automation engines and associated DevOps tools as they see fit to create what the company describes a software factory.
Other new capabilities being added to CA AutoSys include the ability to centrally manage all the various agents the company provides, support for connecting to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure Database Services, improved load balancing and the ability to set up more custom email notifications.
Clay noted the rate at which IT organizations are embracing DevOps varies widely. Just about every organization has at least one DevOps project or pilot in place, but most of them are still relatively nascent compared to the level of sophistication being applied by web-scale companies, he said.
CA Technologies is betting that, rather than stitching together components themselves, enterprise IT organizations will prefer a more modular platform that requires less effort to set up without locking them into a specific tool.
DevOps is coming to the enterprise in one form or another. But unlike web-scale companies, where developers and engineers have tended to work closely together from the inception of the company, enterprise IT organizations will navigate myriad culture issues. There has been a historic predisposition in enterprise IT organizations for developers to “throw code over the wall” to IT operations, with little regard for how that code might run in the actual production environment. IT operations teams, meanwhile, have not always been as forthcoming about the state of that production environment as they might be. That lack of trust and visibility means both sides often make decisions that are not always in the best interest of the overall organization. For example, an application workload might wind up being deployed on a public cloud, even though that platform may be both more expensive and less secure.
At the same time, it’s still not clear to what degree warring cultures inside the enterprise will be able to put aside their historic animosities to create a coordinated approach to automation and DevOps. Mainframe and distributed computing teams to this day still battle for control over workloads inside the enterprise. Whatever the outcome, there’s no doubt various teams will eventually be forced to work more closely together to achieve DevOps goals regardless of whether they like it.
— Mike Vizard
