This post was originally published on ThoughtsOnCloud on April 29th, 2014.
As I explained in my earlier blog post, “Cloud accelerates the evolution of mankind,” I believe that cloud has the power to change the world. It achieves this by giving us speed—and this has an exponential effect.
When I first became a professional software developer in the late 1980s, we spent two years designing and writing a software product that our team thought was what the market wanted. We went through a very thorough waterfall process of design (code, unit test, functional verification test, system test, quality assurance) and eventually released the product through sales and marketing. This cost us millions and eventually sold 14 copies.
More recently we’ve begun to adopt lean principles in software innovation and delivery to create a continuous feedback loop with customers. The thought is to get ideas into production fast, get people to use the product, get feedback, make changes based on the feedback and deliver the changes to the user. We need to eliminate any activity that is not necessary for learning what the customers want.
Speed is key. The first step was to move from waterfall to a more iterative and incremental agile software development framework. After that, the biggest delay was the provisioning of the development and test environments. Citigroup found that it took an average of 45 days to obtain space, power and cooling in the data center, have the hardware delivered and installed, have the operating system and middleware installed and begin development. Today, we replace that step with infrastructure as a service (IaaS).
The next biggest delays in the software development lifecycle are the handovers. Typically a developer will work in the line of business. He will write, build and package his code and unit test it. He then needs to hand it over to the IT operations department to provide a production-like environment for integration, load and acceptance testing. Once this is complete the developer hands it over completely to the operations department to deploy and manage it in the production environment. These handovers inevitably introduce delay and also introduce the chance for errors as the operations team cannot have as complete an understanding of the solution as the developer. Also there will be differences between each environment and so problems can still arise with the solution in production.
By introducing a DevOps process, we begin to merge the development and operations teams and give the power to the developer to build solutions that are stable and easy for IT operations to deliver and maintain. Delivery tasks are tracked in one place, continuous integration and official builds are unified and the same deployment tool is used for all development and test environments so that any errors are detected and fixed early. With good management of the deployable releases, development can be performed on the cloud for provisioning to an on-premises production environment or the reverse; solutions can quickly be up and running in the cloud and as their usage takes off it may prove economical to move them on premises.
Of course there is risk in giving the power to the developer. The handover delays happen for a reason—to ensure that the solution is of sufficient quality to not break the existing environment. This is why the choice of tooling is so crucial. The IBM UrbanCode solution not only automates the process but provides the necessary governance.
As I discussed in my blog post “Cloud’s impact on the IT team job descriptions,” introducing IaaS to this means that the role of the IT operations department is reduced. They may still be needed to support the environment, especially if it is a private cloud, but the cloud gives self service to the developer and tester to create and access production-like environments directly. It brings patterns to automatically create and recreate reproducible infrastructure and middleware environments.
In my next post I will discuss the next step that can be taken to increase the speed of the development cycle:platform as a service (PaaS). I’d love to hear what do you think are the benefits of DevOps with the cloud and other ways to accelerate delivery? Please leave a comment below.
Sam Garforth 