As a senior DevOps consultant working with large organizations over many years, I have been involved in more than 70 digital transformation projects, with hundreds of applications. While many things have changed over time, one thing has been a consistent source of problems that presents a formidable impedance to these transformations. The diverse number of DevOps platforms and tool variants used in those platforms results in a chaotic software delivery environment. From the point of view of any one application, almost any choice of DevOps platform and toolchain is fine, to an extent. But when you stand back and look at the larger picture, an enterprise with many variations of DevOps platforms and tools is at best chaotic; at worst, it is a gross impediment to overall organizational agility – which undermines the very purpose that DevOps is meant to serve.
I relate to the quote “You don’t need another CI/CD automation tool. You have too many already.” The aggregate set of platforms and tools is like a Frankenstein’s monster with many incompatible parts resulting in an awkward looking product that is hard to control, replicate and evolve.
DevOps Platform Blockages
Success with DevOps requires frictionless interplay between the people, processes and technologies that need to cooperate for continuous deliveries to happen effectively. All three of these factors are impacted when an organization has too many variants of DevOps platforms.
People factors – It starts with leadership. Business leaders want to leverage the values of continuous flow of software improvement made possible by DevOps. However, the flow is bottlenecked when the services of the organization must be delivered through a disparate combination of unconnected pipelines, each with separate processes to monitor, manage, troubleshoot and maintain.
Process factors – Continuous delivery works because the DevOps platforms enable automation of processes to remove bottlenecks in flow. Process management and improvements are seriously slowed down when the details of automating the orchestration, execution and monitoring for software version management, integration, testing, security assurance and deployment processes are not standard between different DevOps platform variants.
Technology factors – Often application development teams have their own favorite DevOps platform and a chosen set of tools. However, when application development teams in the same organization choose different DevOps platforms and tools, sharing knowledge, process data and practices becomes difficult. These incompatibilities slow down the overall evolution of continuous delivery for the organization.
Requirements for a Unified DevOps Enterprise Platform
Culture barriers, process problems, and DevOps platform “wars” are factors impacting the progress of digital transformations. A new unified enterprise DevOps platform would accelerate time-to-value and realize efficient, safe operation for digitally transforming enterprises and organizations. The following are general requirements for a unified enterprise DevOps platform.
● A new unified approach that supports end-to-end capabilities for continuous delivery of software, as a managed service, for multiple streams of pipelines is needed.
● Unified capabilities should include visibility, orchestration, integration, security, compliance, governance, traceability and management of flow for application value streams across multiple pipelines.
● Businesses need unified metrics that show business value, costs of the value stream and timing for end-to-end continuous delivery flow across multiple pipelines.
● A new unified approach is necessary to simplify and accelerate toolchains that support new cloud-native and cloud-adapted applications, infrastructures, machine learning, commercial off-the-shelf and open-source software.
What This Means
Digital transformations are an imperative for modern enterprises and organizations to remain competitive. However, the transformations of many enterprises and organizations are being seriously impeded by having too many DevOps platforms and tools. A new unified enterprise DevOps platform is needed to resolve the technical problems of broken, leaky, “Frankenstein” toolchains and processes.
