CA Technologies, at its recent CA Automation Summit, advanced its case for leveraging automation to create a software development factory via an update to the CA Automic One automation platform that adds automation-as-code functionality.
Gwyn Clay, vice president of product management for the Automation Business Unit at CA Technologies, said the latest release of CA Automic One make is simpler to “left shift” automation artifacts by making it possible for developers to embed those artifacts within application code versus having to wait for a DevOps teams to run them out of band.
The latest version of CA Automic One also now includes version control and lifecycle management for automation artifacts that enables automation objects such as jobs, workflows and scripts to be promoted from development to production as part of an integrated DevOps process, said Clay.
CA Technologies also revealed it is embedding intelligence into workflows enabled by CA Automic One, which enables dynamic runtime estimations that can predict potential issues within certain paths in the workflow execution.
Other new capabilities added to the automation platform include support for PostgreSQL databases, as well as new integrations with CA Workload Automation, CA Continuous Delivery Director and CA Jarvis analytics software delivered as a cloud service.
CA Technologies has been on a multi-year campaign to embed automation across the entire DevOps processes. With this latest release, that campaign effort is being extended to developers themselves. Clay said the rise of digital business transformation—much of which is being driven by cloud-native applications built with technologies such as Docker containers, Kubernetes orchestration software and serverless computing frameworks—is finally forcing the automation issue in the enterprise. Not only are applications being built faster than ever, but the complexity of those applications has increased exponentially. And yet, the size of the overall IT staff has remained stagnant. Without some form of automation being embedded within the applications itself modern software development practices becomes difficult to sustain, she said.
Clay noted that most organizations are not yet at the point where they are deconstructing monolithic applications into a set of microservices. But it’s already clear most new applications will be built on a microservices architecture. CA Automic One represents an opportunity to apply automation across both legacy monolithic applications in addition to embedding artifacts directly within new applications, she noted.
It’s not clear the impact the ability to embed automation artifacts will have on how enterprise IT is managed going forward. IT operations teams still will need to be able to set policies and constraints concerning the level of automation a developer might be able to invoke. Most developers don’t have much regard for the need to share limited infrastructure resources with other applications. But as the ability to infuse automaton into almost every application becomes pervasive, the locus of power within enterprise IT organizations will continue to shift to the left. The challenge now is determining the best way to strike a balance between all the competing factions looking to control who gets to automate what exactly when.