Is DevOps Still the Elephant in Your Room?
(Part 2 of 2: HCAF Integration with VMware) Maybe it’s time to expand the size of your room. Adopt a more inclusive infrastructure-as-code culture and drive change throughout your entire organization. Discover how your cross-functional business units can also benefit. Engineer new possibilities, enhance performance, and redefine processes to accelerate the pace of change.
In this special CDI guest blog, I explain how CDI and VMware are transforming the business landscape and leading the adoption of a mature new infrastructure-as-code culture with VMware Code Stream supported by CDI’s Hybrid Cloud Automation Framework.
The DevOps Challenge
By now we all know that attempts to synthesize the management of our infrastructure and development teams under the DevOps umbrella have faced significant challenges. Traditionally, organizations have struggled to define a common ground from a process and technology perspective. Their record with DevOps has been mixed at best:
- Development teams were often focused almost exclusively on churning out new features. They were disciplined enough to version their code branches, but allowed too many bugs to slip through. Many developers were often unaware of the implications of their own architecture changes on the infrastructure teams.
- Infrastructure teams were focused on security, stability, scale, and system availability. They might be guilty of skipping a disciplined versioning strategy, but enforced quality assurance. When it only takes one security bug to sour your uptime metrics, it’s easy to understand the friction and other roadblocks to collaboration.
To further illustrate the divide, an infrastructure team would describe their leading enterprise application as a rock-solid system-of-record. They would advocate quarterly patches and carefully scheduled maintenance windows. A development team would describe their enterprise application in terms of its level of customer engagement with weekly or even daily updates pushed out into production systems in real-time. (Bugs? What bugs? It’s in beta.)
They were both describing the same enterprise application!
That’s the challenge of DevOps. The elephant in the room. The 800-pound gorilla. (Insert your own cliché here for the major problems faced by your entire organization that no one wants to talk about.)
Management wants to unite those two visions because their balanced precision is critical to success. They want speed and quality. Moreover, beyond these challenges, when we look at DevOps from a more holistic angle, there are added complications stemming from the lack of cohesion between the two teams, which often take the form of reduced business agility and lower resiliency.
If a company culture can find comfort in change, they can build better platforms, a steady cadence of product releases, and a faster evolving service model. They can break down the barriers between business units. They need a new foundation for working together, new collaboration tools, and a new process model for delivering quality services.
An Infrastructure-as-Code Culture
Most people agree that technology delivers a better customer experience. However, they sometimes forget that they need to focus, not on tools, but on changing their corporate culture. A resilient and adaptive culture is key to ensuring the success of your DevOps initiatives.
A process-oriented model changes the way organizations view teams. You can now re-think what your empowered teams can deliver. For example, the IT Security team can embed their code into the software layer or platform stack directly. It’s a more engaging model.
A quarterly update to a major cloud app or one major release per year is not going to drive the business. It’s not a sustainable model against the competition. It won’t do any good to attempt to insulate your Ops teams against external disruptive technologies. And it certainly won’t yield the double-digit growth your stock needs to satisfy industry analysts and investors.
The teams that enjoy success today are the ones that unify operations and development, blend in other business units and stakeholders from other teams, and consider their vendors as partners. This infrastructure-as-code culture is about transformation and governance. The essential challenge is demystified with a roadmap for converting ideas into production-ready features capable of competing in the market.
The following examples demonstrate how the infrastructure-as-code culture is delivering value today:
- A security architect and his team are empowered by improvements to their test cycles. They push their own code changes into production systems. Their company launches its own platform-as-a-service (PaaS) with a more mature set of capabilities beyond their limited OS model.
- A financial manager quantifies the opportunity costs, compares the ROI of adoption, and calculates the actual and pending losses at stake when teams fail to participate, security risks surface, or release dates slip.
- Teams can still use their current physical routers, switches, and other hardware, but they can also integrate better with the virtual network if their mature model includes devices that were built for Software Defined Networking (SDN). They want to administer their physical and virtual devices in a centralized integrated SDN architecture that includes switches, routers, gateways, virtual switches, RAS gateways, and other network virtualization devices.
- Teams are adopting a model that says we are no longer running manual scripts. Instead, we are unifying those scripts and applying automation and orchestration because we recognize the control we get.
Leveraging the vRealize Code Stream Management Pack for IT DevOps
Code Stream includes an IT DevOps Management Pack that plugs into vRA. Powered by the VMware Code Stream plug-in, manage your services in the vRealize automation (vRA) repository. A powerful VMware automation solution, vRA provides a service catalog of application blueprints to build, migrate, add, and modify your application infrastructure resources.
All essential artifacts are controlled as you automate testing and advance from dev to test to production. It’s infrastructure-as-code and it is breaking down barriers between infrastructure teams and developers.
The solution provides a maturity model and vision for the future. You can engage in a simplified conversation with the other business units about improving speed, resolving impediments, reducing time-to-market snags late in the cycle, accelerating agility, and delivering a service catalog with a future pipeline.
You start with a library of catalog offerings, processes, or services and develop them as blueprints. When they have been tested in a vSphere development environment, you’re ready to migrate to production. Imagine the raw power of moving one of your vRA blueprints from your development instance to your production instance.
Other benefits:
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- Open a migration request, schedule an optional final test phase, and review the pipeline.
- Monitor each request as it progresses through each phase en route to successful delivery.
- Sign in to the production instance and confirm the availability of the new offering.
- Management gets its own new business decision engine with options for building standard processes and leveraging advanced features such as stack enablement to maximize investment.
Code Stream enables your central IT team to host and manage new application workloads that lines of business and development operation teams drive. Application teams can independently automate and streamline their software release process while they continue to use their preferred provisioning and deployment tools.
You can also enable teams to architect their software development and delivery process in a release pipeline (sequence of stages). Each stage would likely have multiple tasks and environments.
When your team makes changes, the software verifies they satisfy a set of custom gating rules before they advance to the next stage in the delivery pipeline. You can define gating rules such as compliance, certification, or testing requirements when you create a pipeline blueprint.
- The mature process model reliably tests and safely migrates your code without introducing human error. You can even configure progressively more rigid stage gates and approval criteria to ensure higher levels of quality as your code makes its way closer to its final production endpoint.
The Final Word
The most important goal of this infrastructure-as-code mindset is to combine the power of our common objectives to deliver value to your customers more efficiently.
Your teams can independently accelerate their software release process and strengthen their deployment tools and provisioning capabilities. Together with CDI, we speak your language and can help you get up to speed with hosting and managing new application workloads.
As advocates for the customer, we often highlight the need to re-align multiple lines of business. The next level of maturity involves the alignment of infrastructure and development efforts. This is where the CDI Hybrid Cloud Automation Framework (HCAF) and VMware Code Stream bridge the gap between infrastructure and development and drive the successful culture shift at your organization.
Time-to-value, speed, and delivery are the result of developing a culture, best practices, and automation framework that drive fast, efficient, and reliable products and services. When you adopt DevOps as a business capability and leverage HCAF with Code Stream, you are empowering your organization with a culture transition and tool set designed to facilitate efficient release planning, predictability, and delivery.
Thank you for having me as your guest blog contributor.