The Tech Behind DevOps

There was a great article this week on IT World Canada called, "Why over 40% of IT departments are a DevOps nightmare" that discusses what I've been evangelizing to our customers:

"Automation is a key part of any DevOps project, and that must extend down to the infrastructure level, he warned."  

"He" being Ashish Kuthiala, senior director, marketing and strategy for DevOps at Hewlett Packard Enterprise.  Ashish continues:

“Set up automatic testing triggers upon code check-in, automate handoffs between teams, and carefully explore how to leverage automation to consistently deploy and configure your infrastructure,” he said. “Once something works well, codify it. Make it automated and repeatable so you can reduce errors, accelerate routine tasks, and ensure repeatability.”

As I've mentioned in previous posts - the tougher challenges come with people and processes, but technology to seamlessly automate your every repeatable task from Dev to Stage to UAT to Perf to Prod, etc, is equally critical.  Having common tooling for Automation that spans across the "wall" from Dev/Test to Day 2 Ops and back will make things oooohhhh so much easier.  Dealing with the same data, processes, and tools will facilitate process continuity as well as the new communication paradigm needed for DevOps to be a success.

Just like Electric Company.

To that point, the term "DevOps" itself comes with an obvious connotation - Dev is in IT's business and vice versa.  This has substantial benefits AS WELL AS many bumps and bruises to egos and communication constructs along the way.

Companies will have to decide, for example, how much development teams are to be involved in the provisioning process, now that all of the infrastructure suddenly speaks their language. And whoever pays the bills will have to negotiate policies on provisioning and usage of quickly-accessible resources. That’s a whole other layer of politics to contend with, before you even get to the fun stuff.

Here's the cool thing:  VMware has it figured out, having gone through the internal pains ourselves.  Once we topped off the transformation that was the "Journey to IaaS and PaaS", what was next?  Well, once you paint all the walls in the house, the floor boards now look dingy and scuffed.  The logical next phase was continuing upstream into the SDLC with pipeline release management via offerings like vRealize Code Stream.  Stay tuned for more on that.

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Greg Robert Dean is a Transformation Advisor in VMware's Software Defined Enterprise Business Unit.