THE AUTONOMOUS DIGITAL ENTERPRISE – LETS MAKE IT PRACTICAL (PART 6 – ENTERPRISE DEVOPS)
- New Island Technologies
- No Comments
- Blogs
In the previous articles in the series the Autonomous Digital Enterprise (ADE) was introduced. You should read all the articles in this series to see how the ADE provides you with the framework to digitally transform your business.
In this article we will evaluate the benefits of the Enterprise DevOps tenet.
With World Creativity and Innovation Day on 21 April, this is a great topic. After all, the evolution of business is all about new ideas and bringing them to life quickly, to grow the business, in a sustainable manner.
To understand the impact of DevOps and why we need critical focus on creating the right platform to work efficiently, we need to answer three questions.
Q1 – What is DevOps and why do we need it?
DevOps was designed to address the need for agility and speed required to remain relevant in a fast-changing environment, from development to IT operations – continuously. Businesses need a way to respond quickly to market changes and customer requirements. This places Agility front and centre, but businesses also understand that you cannot focus only on the speed at which you push out new products, features, and functions. It still needs to happen in a controlled and secure manner without slipping on quality. And what gets delivered must be easy to operate in production.
Companies that use DevOps are better able to keep up with the ever-changing demands of their customers and competitors. As a result, they are more likely to succeed in today’s competitive marketplace. DevOps is quickly becoming the standard way to develop, deploy and run software, and businesses that don’t adopt it will fall behind.
Enterprise DevOps takes this beyond the software development sphere and extends these practices into the business.
Q2 – How ready are South African businesses for DevOps?
There is a continuous drive to find ways to deliver value faster and reduce the cost and complexity of development and IT operations.
South African businesses are slowly but surely starting to adopt DevOps. A recent study by Puppet Labs found that 40% of South African businesses are currently using DevOps practices, and this number is expected to grow in the coming years.
We can see that there is a clear growth path and that businesses are recognising the benefits of a DevOps agenda to drive business agility.
Q3 – Are the South African workforce and skills available to drive the DevOps agenda?
The short answer is YES! If you look at the latest Skills Gap report by ITWeb and also the Employment Insights report from CarreerJunction, it is clear that DevOps has become a highlight on job specs and CV’s alike. It might still be a gap but there are ample skills in the market to help businesses build out or evolve DevOps practices and centres-of-excellence.
DevOps is not just highlighted as an in-demand skill but is also listed as one of the top 10 roles for future jobs.
The old hands in the market have recognised the benefits of DevOps practises and the new blood want to work with exciting modern tech – a win-win combination for all.
How BMC helps you prepare for, and succeed with Enterprise DevOps?
The BMC ADE model makes it clear; Actionable Insights, Business Agility and Customer Centricity sits at the core and Enterprise DevOps undeniably supports these.
By embracing the ADE model, you can adopt DevOps practices, tools, and skills across your business to improve the speed, quality, and security of your software development and deployment processes. This will help you to be more agile, innovative, and responsive to the needs of your customers.
The Steps towards an ADE with BMC
Foundational – The Baseline
- Dev focused automation for applications (CI/CD)
Individual application teams use continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) to accelerate application releases into test environments.
- On demand provision / config
Developers can get cloud resources and environments through a request/approval process.
- Post hoc test and security
Testing and security scan of code happens after, and separate from, the release process.
- Best practice change management
Understand the impact of changes; prioritize and calendar them; and record and review post release findings.
- Intelligent risk analysis
Having visibility within various teams help manage risk.
Transformational
- Shift left workflow orchestration
“Shift left” means moving activities that happen later in the development cycle (on the right) to earlier in the cycle (to the left). Shift left can be applied to monitoring solutions, service management and automation alike.
- Improve Dev and Ops collaboration with a Jos-as-code approach.
With the Jobs-as-Code approach your production automation forms part of the application development and follows your CI/CD pipelines and tools. Automation and orchestration no longer get delayed and actioned after handover to Ops and release to production, thus speeding up quality production deployment.
- Integrated test & security
As indicated by ‘shift left’, test and security are integrated into the development process instead of taking place afterwards.
- Automated change management
Changes are auto prioritized and scheduled based on impact and availability. Post release reviews are autogenerated.
- Risk analytics/synchronization
With improved inter-team communication risk is now managed end-to-end with quick and effective ways of mitigation.
ADE – Autonomous Future
- Discover processes and bottlenecks that inhibit DevOps
Implementing automation in the DevOps cycle is step 1; being able to measure and improve performance, quality, etc. is the second step. In the ADE, DevOps speed and quality are measured and monitored so processes can be improved, and bottlenecks removed.
- Provide modified metrics and policies that enable automated controls
Much like the early days of CSM measurement, DevOps metrics around Dev quality, accuracy, speed, etc. are new kids on the block. In the ADE, KPIs related to code release speed and quality, production impact, etc. are developed and used to implement controls and improvement.
- Streamline Compliance / Open-source governance and License Entitlement
These result from a ‘shift left’ of security. Making sure code is in compliance, uses accepted open-source code/versions and licensed proprietary software means reducing or eliminating risk prior to release.
BMC Offers solutions to enable and improve your Enterprise DevOps journey in Mainframe, distributed and cloud environments.
Mainframe DevOps | DevOps Automation & Jobs-as-Code | DevOps in Service Management
If you want to learn more about the benefits of BMC’s Enterprise DevOps Tenet, please reach out to André Esterhuysen at New Island Technologies.
