A sober view of DevOps and the value it can create
Enterprise IT is being forced to deliver software faster to the business and the customer in order to fully participate in the digital economy. Agile development and DevOps processes have become foundational capabilities upon which businesses can transform to meet the challenges of the digital world.
Those processes were created to give businesses the flexibility to pivot to meet changing conditions and to get software out the door more quickly. What drives these efforts towards digital transformation is the timely release and deployment of software.
But each enterprise takes its own approach to software delivery, and often, each team within those enterprises operates at a different speed. “Typical enterprise IT can be described as a highly regulated hybrid IT environment containing a mixture of waterfall and agile geographically dispersed teams supporting both legacy systems and new apps. Large enterprises have hundreds of apps deployed across many different environments and it’s in a constant state of change and not all going at the same speed,” said Mark Levy, director of product marketing at Micro Focus. And within these different systems lie so many dependencies. “Being able to manage multiple deployment pipelines across this vast heterogenous system is the biggest problem in scaling these [Agile and DevOps] practices across the enterprise,” Levy added.
Enterprises won’t start down the path to successful DevOps and digital transformation until they embrace the fact that a hybrid IT environment — on-premises, cloud, mobile and edge — will always exist, and applications living on a back-end and those that face customers, for instance, may have different requirements for delivery. Thus, a multimodal approach needs to be adopted.
“There’s a level of maturity of conversation that needs to happen in the marketplace, and hopefully that can be a starting point to drive some of that,” said Julian Fish, director of product management, Application Release Orchestration at Microfocus. “As enterprises adopt DevOps to accelerate software delivery, they need to take a discipline and programmatic approach to ensuring the security, compliance, and performance of the entire value chain”.
Release management processes can help enterprises move applications through their CI/CD pipelines, but starts to come up short by the lack of visibility and traceability, poor coordination, and time-consuming manual tasks that are prone to error and difficult to track. The next step is to move toward release orchestration and automation, which is how successful DevOps organizations support these complex, hybrid IT environments.
Then, organizations can learn that they need to have multiple DevOps processes to deal with the multiple systems and platforms their applications live on and run on. In a recent paper titled “Software Release: A Point of Control for Delivering in a Hybrid IT Landscape,” analysis firm CCS Insight wrote, “There needs to be an interconnected status of process, tools and deployment platforms if change and release management is to help deliver a coherent DevOps process that spans all systems in use inside and outside an organization.”
Micro Focus looks at optimizing an organization’s value stream through release orchestration, which it views in two parts: release control and deployment automation. According to the CCS Insights report, Microfocus Release Control is used to make sure changes are repeatable, auditable and have the right amount of governance. Deployment Automation is key to increasing the speed of software delivery, regardless of destination — cloud, on-premises or hybrid — by automating processes and mitigating risk.
DevOps can help organizations derive value from their software — through efficient production processes and customer satisfaction — by identifying teams and work that support value, mapping the value stream to identify areas of improvement and optimizing flow to improve speed.
To learn more, join Micro Focus and SD Times for an upcoming discussion that takes a pragmatic view of DevOps in large enterprises.
Content provided by SD Times and Micro Focus
The post A sober view of DevOps and the value it can create appeared first on SD Times.
Tech Developers
No comments