DevOps: The (Absolutely Critical) Cloud Enabler

A couple weeks ago, I gave a talk titled, “DevOps: The Cloud Enabler” at a conference. As I was putting together some requisite materials previewing my session, I made a few mistakes. (Yes, I’ll readily admit it.) I used the words “should” and “can” and “consider.” Instead, the words “must” or “not optional” or “operationally imperative” make better sense.

Companies are moving to the cloud (or at least endeavoring to); that’s a fact of IT life. If you’re not doing it, your competitors are lapping you. That may not be what you want to hear, but hey, reality bites. The cloud is simply the most scalable, flexible, efficient way to run a business these days. Cloud was just a buzzword for the longest time, but companies in all industries are actually putting it to work now. If your CIO isn’t at least in the midst of forming an application migration plan to the cloud, it might be time to light a fire under him or her; otherwise, start reading the writing on the wall and look for a new gig.

Easier said than done, though, right? I’ve heard many a CIO say, “We’re going to have all our apps in the cloud by 2018!” No, you’re not. You don’t know how. You don’t have the tools and road map to get there. Let me enlighten you with some of those stronger, more urgent words I mentioned earlier. In your move to the cloud, DevOps MUST be the conduit. Period. Stop. End of argument. Game, set, match. Not optional; it’s imperative.

Here’s why: One of the most fundamental problems that’s part and parcel of a move to reliance on the cloud is that IT orgs want every scrum team to have its own environment, complemented by an individual database instance. Eventually, that leads to creating a distinct database instance for every single developer. You probably can see where this is headed.

I’ve used this comparison time and time again, but cloud and database instances become like the wire hangers in your closet you accumulate every time you pick up clothes from the dry cleaner. They multiply over time and, all of a sudden, you seemingly have a million on your hands, with no idea where they came from and no good way to get rid of them. To compound things, once the proliferation begins, it’s hard to stop. Shut down a database instance (as with an application instance), and you lose the underlying data. No can do.

That reality spells disaster for the database administrators (DBAs) being flooded with thousands of development SQL scripts and database changes across multiple app release cycles across multiple environments. For DBAs to attempt to keep pace with this rise in change requests, organizations all but have to go through DevOps’ economies of scale. DBAs need reprieve, and DevOps can be just that. David Linthicum put the solution thusly: “Stop separating the development and operations skills; they are tightly coupled and need to be peers. You’ll find this is the hardest part of the process of moving to devops and the cloud.”

Spot on. To be more prescriptive:

• Developers need to understand what DBAs are dealing with as part of the cloud migration and know how their work rolls downhill.
• Automation needs to reign supreme, removing manual work.
• Developers need to have the ability to be involved directly in cloud ops and enact 95 percent of changes themselves.
• DBAs need to be freed to oversee the 5 percent of changes that truly need their attention and management skills.
• The flow from cloud application updates to cloud DB changes needs to be seamless.

In bringing development and DBAs into sync, DevOps then becomes the vital remedy, the critical cloud enabler.

TL;DR: If you have DevOps alignment, processes, responsibilities and tooling properly implemented in advance, then when you decide to move to the cloud, you can simply flip the switch from on-premise to the cloud. One click and you won’t miss a beat. Seriously, it’s that easy. Sound appealing? I know.

If you truly want to get to the cloud, you must have a sound DevOps strategy that encompasses application development, web and the database. Without that in place, swim at your own risk. This is the year that we’ll see much more of the true impact of DevOps. And that’s coming just in the nick of time, because without DevOps, CIOs and their IT orgs would be in for some nasty surprises in their all-important moves to the cloud.