DevOps breaks down the tradition

Recently Rackspace announced the findings of a global Vanson Bourne study on the adoption of DevOps initiatives for Rapid Application Delivery (RAD). DevOps is becoming increasingly

recognized as an established industry practice and the rate of adoption is remarkable given its relative infancy. Over three quarters (77%) of the respondents said they were familiar with term DevOps, with 55% having already implemented DevOps practices. A further 31% said they were planning to implement it by the end of 2017. On the sidelines of the report, Dataquest interacted with Ajit Melarkode, Managing Director, APAC, Rackspace. Excerpts

What is the cultural change DevOps introduces?

DevOps isn’t a tool or a product. It’s an operational approach that changes how organizations think about developing and deploying applications. The ultimate goal is creating better customer experiences.

By uniting development and operations teams to automate and standardize such efforts as infrastructure deployment, you get faster innovation, accelerated time to market, improved deployment quality, better operational efficiency and more time to focus on your core business goals.

Successful adoption of DevOps starts with a culture that breaks down traditional development vs operations silos, promotes communication between everyone involved in delivering applications and emphasizes constant process and product improvement.

It’s a fundamentally different way in which the IT organization

thinks as well as a different way in which the business users of IT think.

How does it change the service model? What does it

mean for Indian enterprises?

The service model of developers and operators functioning completely separately stops. Sharing ideas and improvements, no matter where they originate, creates a vital feedback loop for the entire applications delivery process.

Continuously monitoring applications and environments iteratively improves code and processes. In a nutshell, more is shared and communicated, silos are broken down and teams come together, more is measured and more is automated, drastically improving time to market and customer experience.

How does it change the service model? What does it

mean for Indian enterprises?

The service model of developers and operators functioning completely separately stops. Sharing ideas and improvements, no matter where they originate, creates a vital feedback loop for the entire applications delivery process. Continuously monitoring applications and environments iteratively improves code and processes. In a nutshell, more is shared and communicated, silos are broken down and teams come together, more is measured and more is automated, drastically improving time to market and customer experience.

For the customers of the Indian offshoring sector whether it be the SIs or the offshore arms of multinationals, it pushes a new way of thinking and calls for combinations of IT development offices and IT operational back offices that may be functioning disparately.

For Indian companies in general, they have to dispel myths such as being too small or not being in the West or not being in Silicon Valley as excuses for not adopting the approach and driving better and faster outcomes for business users of IT.

Are there enterprises which can live with NoOps as well?

It depends on what the organizational objectives are. My view is that even with extreme automation, the Ops will have to be managed somewhere at some point in time, whether within or outside the organization. Even if you use an external PaaS or cloud services, the Ops is being managed somewhere. You can have a DevOps team with a small emphasis on Ops as a build towards this.

The majority of leading companies in IT are going towards DevOps rather than NoOps, which I currently see utopia with few real world examples. In the developer only world that NoOps implies, I don’t yet see the cultural changes in training that will see top developers happy to work on even the occasional operational issues at 3 am on a Sunday.

What are the challenges and organizational drivers for DevOps?

Changing culture is always hard and to complete the change in thinking to foster Devops in any organization falls under this bucket and needs to be driven from the top of the business, not just the IT organization.

It is particularly hard to go from a culture of silos to sharing and increased communication. Joining people, processes and technology is another challenge within the overall cultural change. Developers cannot just showcase a tool or an application for better collaboration and operations just showcase a best practice process to use—there really has to be end-to-end change, eg, will the adoption of the new tool or application actually facilitate the best practice process to run faster? Will the process challenge conventional development

methodologies to change—eg, a lot of our clients combine Agile and Waterfall-V into a single development methodology to speed up operational delivery.

Lots of organizations have been using aspects of DevOps like automated testing for a while now, but to make it a more overarching philosophy for quicker results, organizational culture has to change. The overarching organizational driver for this change will be speed to market.

How DevOps have changed the technology side?

As covered, it will first of all need a complete change in organizational design, culture and the coming together of IT development and IT operations. At Rackspace, we’ve managed this with adhering to some of our core values and principles on which we operate as a company like ‘full disclosure & transparency’ and ‘treat Rackers like friends & family’, which promotes open communication and collaboration at every level, every division and every region of the company.

As another change, teams have to foster and get used to measuring results on a more continuous basis and be prepared

for more focus on opex tracking as there is more virtualization, automation and faster cycles to launch for applications.

What is the future of DevOps?

Wider adoption for sure. We can see competitive advantage being created by organizations adopting DevOps and that will create market value and decide the winners and losers in IT intensive industries, especially in the e-commerce space, including commerce arms of large enterprises. Product development cycles will collapse as will time to fail at the product level and enterprise level, which I believe will ultimately create more innovation through faster testing of ideas and go

to market.

A recent Puppet Labs survey suggests that companies practicing DevOps deploy code 30 times more frequently than others. The DevOps Automation Service that we offer clients for example, is comprised of the same tools and best-practices that enabled Rackspace to launch 18 new cloud products, push

code into production more than 2,500 times and run

over 15,000 automated tests within a year.