DevOps. Redefining Your Organization s IT strategy

Transcription

1 DevOps Redefining Your Organization s IT strategy White Paper - July 2016

2 intro Rich Hein, Senior Managing Editor, CIO Is DevOps a culture or a skillset? The answer is it seems is both, some even refer to it as a philosophy DevOps aims to break down those silos to get everyone working towards the same goal DevOps isn t something you can just decide to do. Much like big data, it requires a culture change and a breaking down of the functioning silos within the IT organization. It needs to start at the top. The end-game is to have your development and operations team working in a collaborative fashion toward the collective goal of continuous delivery of better software. INTRODUCTION Ever since organizations have been using IT internally or as part of their product portfolio and development, department heads and functions have been grappling with simplifying processes. Because as we all know, the more complicated things are, there are more technology layers that are needed to uncomplicate them, which in turn makes managing all of them even more complicated. The more you try to ensure that everyone knows what everyone else is doing, it seems somehow that silos do get created unwittingly. Functional roles and departments start getting encumbered by their own platforms, their own IT solutions and their own dashboards which they watch over with an eagle eye. Silos, dashboards, IT platforms and solutions that are not compatible with each other, or cannot be integrated with existing systems these are, surprisingly, scenarios that still exist in many mid-sized and large organizations today. It bleeds the company of productive man -hours, financial resources, go-to-market delays where efficiency suffers and eventually impacts profitability. In a world where speed is everything, organizations can no longer ignore solutions that bridge both development and operations and bring in measures that make adoption of DevOps a significant part of their overall IT strategy. In the process businesses must also remember that DevOps is more than a set of tools it s how engineering and operations can come together and work through as teams with increased communications, collaboration and more agile application development by utilizing the Continuous Integration/ Continuous Delivery methodology. Yes, DevOps needs to move from merely being a philosophy that organizations pay lip-service to, to something that is an integral part of the organization s IT make up.

3 one REWORK IS NOT THE WAY TO GO Software development is not something that comes out of a box. Software products take time, energy and a lot of human effort by several people in different teams to ensure that the versions are stable, functional and perform the way it was envisioned it would. Organizations spend months of planning on not just the preparatory work, but even the entire process flow, the marketing, the financials and more, before the product is out of the assembly line so to speak. Every product development causes sleepless nights before product deployment. Is it going to be stable, is it going to fail, if it fails what s the Mean Time To Recover (MTTR), when can you commit to the code, meaning when would it run successfully in production, are some of the very many questions that plague Project Managers, Ops and Development teams. Of course to complicate matter further, the Sales & Marketing teams are breathing down Ops and Dev teams necks as they need to button down their GTM strategies. In the midst of all this, organizations have to also contend with walls between Dev, Ops and Business that need to be scaled - communications, interpersonal harmony, understanding what each function actually does can all prove to be barriers to the end-result a successful product launch. A Forrester report lists out the following factors that actually amplify the DevOps divide: Increased complexity in the service offerings leads to visibility deficit. Dev & Ops teams are sometimes so shrouded in their own bubble, that no one, not even a group of developers have sufficient knowledge of the actual service provided and/or consumed by the business. It is imperative to simplify this web of complexity via technology.

4 Ops and Dev have different ideas about who is really pivotal to the business. The misunderstanding and reinforcement of stereotypes about who is really closer to the business process or consumers leads to misinformation, miscommunication and mismanagement. It s a dangerous road to walk on and is detrimental and destructive to the health of the business. Dev groups seem to be everywhere but in technology management. The divide between Dev & Ops only gets amplified by these notions that each group has of the other. Without a bridge that addresses these misconceptions of each group, businesses can only face obstructions, delays, cost overruns and possibly irrecoverable failure. To add to an already dysfunctional scenario is the fact that application development teams are sometimes unable to cope with the velocity of change of business requirements. Acceleration requires a reset button which often requires rework and retesting besides writing thousands of lines of code, consuming valuable man hours and impeding faster delivery. If organizations have to deliver real business value, they need to have an integrated system that feeds into the various automation processes and looks at it holistically, and builds predictability around the product workflow and output. It s an imperative that they can no longer ignore.

5 two AUTOMATION IS THE KEY Being a business in the new-age economy, ignoring faster time to deliver to your customer is at your own peril, whatever your line of business. Of course organizations do undertake automation for coping and bringing in better efficiencies in the overall management of their business. For Dev & Ops automation, there are some key factors to keep in mind before you undertake automation: Automating already existing bad practices means you do wrong things faster creating further complications to an overburdened development lifecycle To achieve business success, the Dev and Ops teams must focus on improving performance by putting in place automation tools that improve productivity, quality and measurability Choose a reliable automation tool that can be easily integrated with existing platforms such as AWS, Microsoft, GitHub, Jenkins, Chef, Puppet, Jira, Selenium, Sensu, New Relic and others Relevance Lab s RL Catalyst is one such tool. The 2015 State of DevOps Report confirmed unequivocally that organizations that adopted DevOps automation had a strong and positive impact on the overall performance of the organization. The report, based on responses of over 20,000 technical professionals, reveals that adopting the right DevOps approach actually helps organizations embrace and adapt to change easily rather than to fear it, besides lean management and continuous delivery practices that contributed to throughput and stability. While adoption of DevOps has been on the increase, what is significant is that with the right automation tools, organizations can benefit from: Higher quality of output Reduced cycles Faster feedback loops and $ Lower overall costs of development

6 DevOps automation can lead to better quality of code, better testing, better deployability and actually creating a culture of continuous improvement. The 2015 State of DevOps Report found that high performing IT organizations deploy: 30x more frequently with 200x shorter lead times; they have 60x fewer failures and recover 168x faster. DevOps is being successfully practiced by organizations such as salesforce.com, IBM, Etsy and even Facebook. The Forrester Report on Highly Effective DevOps stated some astounding facts: Salesforce.com has up to 9,000 code changes and performs 1.1 million tests per hour. Facebook was easily able to automate full OS and application deployments to 17,000 heterogeneous servers and 17,000 homogeneous servers, all with a single Chef server. IBM accelerated capabilities delivery in its IBM APM SaaS portfolio by 400% in eight months. Etsy improved a typical web deployment which took over an hour (when things went smoothly), down to one person in under 2 minutes. DevOps automation is the way to go if organizations need to impress their customers, remain competitive and thrive in an extremely volatile market where delivery cycle times have shrunk to weeks from months and stability and performance of the application/product are key metrics of success. Like Facebook Production Engineer Phil Dibowitz said, demonstrating some methods we can all borrow to do more (much more) with less, so we can all create our own futures, is the path forward - a path that allows organizations to be nimble and agile to adapt to market conditions and is a key driver of transformation through the automation and optimization of Dev and Ops both. Yes, DevOps is indeed redefining new organization structures by recognizing that technology is needed to not just enable their business, but to create an indelible impact.

7 three WHEN THE IMPACT IS FELT Organizations have always had processes and systems in place where they track, monitor, test and deploy their software products. There have always been teams in place who have worked within siloed groups and operated in a manner that was debilitating to say the least. Today, you need to operate at the maximum level of efficiency, with DevOps automation tools that have in-built visual dashboards which allow you to actually see defects and bottlenecks helping you manage your teams more effectively increasing throughput, stability and quality of performance. An automation tool (such as RL Catalyst for instance with a unique Software Aware Element gives you total control) helps you with CI/CD including automated testing, automated deployment, version control of your IT artefacts, significantly improve your productivity and overall profitability. The 2015 State of DevOps Report found: it doesn t matter how old or new your systems are; high performance can be achieved if the application is architected for testability and deployability. So if you think you can t implement DevOps practices because your app runs on a mainframe, think again. Don t focus on the type of system you have; instead, focus on re-architecting for testability and deployability. In fact, with the adoption of DevOps on the rise, organizations are seeking to hire professionals with DevOps expertise. DevOps is becoming a valued skill for IT professionals. So it begs the question, what happens to the traditional IT Operations professional? It seems unclear, and Gartner data suggests that traditional IT Ops may be slowly easing off, as the figure below suggests. 27.3% 1.8% 38.2% Applications development/software engineering DBA Enterprise Architect IT Operations Management 27.3% 5.5% NoSQL Usage & Adoption Survey. 2013

8 A study conducted by Puppet Labs of more than 9,200 professionals in over 110 countries reported that: Traditional Ops are 41 percent more time-consuming overall. Traditional Ops spends 21 percent more time putting out fires. DevOps spends 33 percent more time on infrastructure improvements. Of course it doesn t mean that IT Operations just disappears, it means that increasingly Ops become a part of development. While organizations are looking at resourcing their IT functions with the right expertise, they are also redefining the way their IT Dev and Ops have operated. The world of DevOps automation is fluid and moving in a very definitive direction. It seems to be the new normal like Tim Park of Microsoft suggests, infrastructure is too complex now to manage with humans, requiring automation of everything. According to Fredric Paul, Editor-in-Chief of New Relic, the potential of DevOps is huge and 3 trends to watch out for in the next 2 or 3 years are: Organizations using DevOps practices see organizational performance benefits, and that firms actually investing in DevOps see significant gains compared to those who do not. Trend #1: Larger Companies Will Embrace Devops sooner Than You Think Trend #2: Open Source Tools Will Evolve To Meet Enterprise Requirements Trend #3: Devops Can Create Career Opportunities if You re Ready The longer an organization uses DevOps methods the higher their IT departments perform. High performing IT organizations have 50 percent lower change fail rates than medium and low performing IT organizations As more and more organizations are walking the path of adoption, one significant factor that is highlighted is that automation of DevOps is essential and necessary for organizations to succeed today. But what proves detrimental to the adoption of tools are people issues and not technology issues.

9 A recent Gartner survey of 367 IT and business leaders, of which 113 were using DevOps, found the following answers to the question they raised: Which of these is the biggest challenge for your organizations expansion of the use of DevOps? 8% Technology issues 37% Process issues 5% Information issues 50% People Issues gartner.com/smarterwithgartner source: Gartner (January 2016) 2016 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademarks of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates. For more information, info@gartner.com or visit gartner.com.

10 CONCLUSION The way of doing business is changing. Perforce, the way of managing IT Dev and IT Ops must also change and adapt with acceleration. DevOps automation tools is definitely a leg up in the right direction, but as surveys studies prove, DevOps is not the barrier but people. If Dev and Ops can communicate more openly, without distrust and realize that by working together more cohesively improves performance, by reducing errors and eliminating rework, it s a win-win for product, process and people. It s time to break the silos, harmonize output for a common goal and blur any confusion between Dev and Ops teams bringing them closer to the business. And if business has to benefit, then organizations have to take the initiative and invest in DevOps adoption which is the key to improved performance and growth. Reimagining your IT Dev and Ops will come only when you start redefining what you want measured the number of lines of code, or how successful your deployment was with the least rate of failure. If change is a constant, then automation of your DevOps is surely the harbinger of such change. About Relevance Lab: Relevance Lab is a DevOps Specialist Company focused on making Cloud adoption easy for Enterprises. RL Catalyst developed by Relevance drives DevOps Automation and Optimization helping enterprises leverage DevOps Driven Engineering, DevOps Driven ITSM and DevOps Leveraged Cloud Governance. Relevance Lab also offers Services for transformation in Digital Content Delivery, Cloud Applications, Big Data based Information Discovery and Software Defined Infrastructure. IND Mob US Sources: ping-it-off/2014/12/devops-the-future-of-application-lifecycle-automation State of DevOps Report by Puppet Labs Forrester Report 7 habits of highly effective DevOps