One of the hottest topics in software development today is DevOps. There really doesn't seem to be any consensus on what DevOps is, but there's definitely a lot of buzz around the subject. Paul Peissner, Director of Business Development at CollabNet and Durga Sammeta, Senior Product Manager from HP, join CM Crossroads publisher, Patrick Egan in this episode of The Crossroads to find out what DevOps really is and how it can help you in your software development process.
From CMC Media, this is The Crossroads. I'm Patrick Egan, publisher of the Agile Journal and the Configuration Management Journal.
Well joining me today from the HP Briefing Center in Cupertino, California, are Durga Sammeta, Senior Product Manager with HP and Paul Peissner, director of business development for global alliances with CollabNet. Well, thanks for joining me today guys.
Great, thank you.
Alright, well, you know one of the hottest topics in development today is DevOps. And there really doesn't seem to be a lot of consensus on what DevOps is. But, I wonder if you could tell me what you think are some of the top business challenges that are driving the buzz around DevOps.
Sure, I think within the context of IT and the business interactions. We see a lot of challenges with organizations moving to agile methodologies and we see businesses really struggling in terms of how to keep up with that and how to manage that, which translates to higher Business costs and more slower business agility in terms of being able to take innovative ideas for the business and turn it into revenue generating projects itself.
Yeah, to be more competitive basically. Right, it's not that development is doing something, building something. But if it is not going out of the door, it's still not going to give you any revenue benefits.
Okay and that really stems from two Organization, IT organization structures within the silos of both of those. You've got agile initiatives that are really driving faster development. From an ITel perspective you have a lot of stability, capabilities and a lot of change resistance built into the BSM.
And so what's really needed for the sake of the business is a blended effort in which both organizations have more visibility to each other.
Well, alright. So, maybe you can give us some background insight into what's going on in the IT in Dev organizations today that are really driving these challenges.
So the background wise, you know, if you look at the traditional way of doing business is... Business right now wants Agility. Business Agility as Paul mentioned, which means they want quality software, services or products, delivered on time. Right, under budget.
What it means for the IT is they have to prioritize their efforts in such a way to meet the business demands and needs. But what happens between the development and operation is development is building something very quickly, using more modern methodologies like SD, like Agile or Scrum, or whatever the more modern methodologies.
But what happens after that is there's a road block between the development and operation side because their priorities are not aligned. So one of the challenges that we see in the market is the prioritization and alignment between development and operations.
So from, from a development perspective, we see a lot of the tools making the developers much more collaborative, getting things done much quicker. The challenge is, it's still a blind-sided manual hand off between the development side and the operation side. Ops tends to, to try and roll out projects that are misaligned with their current architectures. And they're struggling with, you know, how much of the assets need to be internal and outsource out in the cloud, and managed internally as well or out to MSPs. This just adds a layer of complexity for the development teams, where they have no idea where they're going to be developing to...
Exactly.
And how to meet those requirements because the technical pieces are always changing.
Yeah. And most of the times the developers doesn't know what is inside operations. How does the data center architecture, and what are the different layers. How the...they deploy the applications, whether its cloud look like, private cloud, or a public cloud, or a hybrid cloud. Developers doesn't have the visibility into what happens on the ops side. And ops also doesn't have visibility into the ops side, like, OK, how many defects were found? How many defects were fixed in a particular build? Or a release that is going onto their app, on the ops side. So sometimes there's a trust trust issue between the development and ops and sometimes the just lack of pure visibility. Like, okay, how they don't know each other. What other team is doing.
Right.
So, because of that there will be lot of delays for releasing applications to production.
Especially in the development side of the house you end up having a lot of developers reuse some of their best resources when they're creating those projects without the visibility in to how it's affecting the business, how it's making or adding more risks to the development or the operations of the house. It becomes a real challenge in terms of what do they reuse for best practice use without the visibility and the feedback loops that come from both the business use of the application as well as IT support of it as well.
Okay, well that's great. So then what are some solutions to solve some of these challenges?
I think there are some great solutions. It really depends on the maturity of the organizations both as independent IT groups. They tend to grow up with some very strong automation tools. Some great integration, great visibility. Ability, traceability within the disciplines. What's not happened yet to date is that integration all the way across so that ops can see some high risk development efforts that are required by the business, and they can adjust for that in terms of change management, and configuration management, capabilities.
Likewise on the, on the dev side, when things are changing on the operational side of the house, development needs to change its approach to a project mid-flight. There's no automation that gives each other visibility into those deltas that are going to be coming down the road.
Right. So, if you take of all these problems down there, like three things. One is the visibility and there's collaboration between the development and operations. And then there is alignment, lack of alignment between these two teams.
So it's not just necessarily a tools problem. You know, there is a best practices involved in this to solve these problems. There is tools involved in this, there are peoples. There are culture changes, as well, required to really solve these challenges. So that's why you know, we talked about partnering between HP and CollabNet partnership, we can bring some tool integrations and also pioneering in the operations space and quality space from the HP side and also CollabNet, where they bring the best in class, you know, development of tools for application life cycle management.
By aligning and integration between these two tools, the tool challenges is taken care, but still it's not going to be 100 percent because, there are cultural challenges and there are other process challenges still lurking about.
And the HP partnership gives us this real quality in terms of understanding and how to change the templates for testing the capabilities.
Every environment you're pushing an application to has something unique, and to be able to capture that knowledge and to make sure it's well tested to avoid any of the disruptions that come from the this speedy development efforts and the need for consistent delivery of services on the operational side. HP brings that real quality and maturity on that side to make sure that that what is being
Quickly is not going to be destroying the business or the infrastructure as well.
Yeah, it is not just the speed. It is the speed versus end quality. It is the balance between speed and quality.
Yeah.
And, you know, we have been providing, HP has been providing software to make sure the application functions and performs and it's also secure. But that's not just enough, because there is a lot of other people involved in developing the applications, on the development side and also from operation side. So there are lot of alignment and you know again. As I said, it's not just the tool problem, it's also more than that, it's cultural changes and challenges and other things.
Okay, so you guys obviously work with a lot of your customers. So can you share some best practices for audience?
Sure, we see lot of organizations moving towards agility or going agile with there development pieces and that's a great move and it is one of the most cost effective things you can do as well as going and spreading out with your developer teams more the collaborative, more the collaboration tools, so that they have more of the communication tools that that automatically make each others activities visible to the teams, while projects are in mid-flight. Getting trained, getting your teams trained in Agile, with making project management, as well as even configuration change management teams aware of the best practice advantages for having an Agile Scrum kind of environment.
We do lot of training in that space, I think more than anybody else in the world. And it's real important for larger region for the organizations to make sure it's not just the development, but it's really for the sake of the business and to become more agile across the organization.
Yeah, so when it comes best practices . . . You know, as we just mentioned, the biggest challenge is what business function's Agile, or agility. And, what IT is delivering, according to businesses like, it's too slow. So, one thing is to align the priorities, like what business wants and what IT is delivering has to be aligned. That's the number one thing. And once you have the alignment in place then everything falls, you know, in place. And when you are doing Agile, Waterfall, whatever the methodology that you use in the
software development life cycle. And on the operations side, like okay, they are, since, what business wants, they are also part of the whole process. They know like, okay, how to be more proactive in taking the finished goods, like products and deploying it on time instead of delaying it. So, there should be culture of more sharing the priorities, and also bringing people together as a part of the start-up meetings, in the case of Agile or whatever the methodology you may use, but more on the communication side, what 's happening?
I think that for developers, it is also real important that they measure the quality their releases based on the benefits to the organization. So, how much impact did it hit on the operational IT teams? What were the revenue benefits to the business side of the house? I think those are more holistic approaches for the developers. So they're not just starting the project and getting it out of the door in a timely manner, but that they're measuring the whole effect across the organization. And for Dev Make sure that there is complete transparency amongst those things that are going to have impact for development and the project teams that are going to make decisions for those locations as well. I think those are some of the best practices.
The platforms and the tools, you got to leverage the cloud. You're pulling talent from around the world. Having on site software tools doesn't make sense. It's got to be scalable. It's got to be flexible. The strategies that have defined operations need to be extended into development pieces so that those core strategies that help organizations set their IP around operational best practices need to be more inclusive of the development teams as well.
Yeah. OK.
So development and operations, they have to work together because this is the time where everything is moving really fast. If you are slow, you will lose in the market. You will not be competitive. And it's not what business wants. If IT is not delivering it you are basically, you know, out of business.
So, if development and operations work together collaboratively and have some traceability
visibility into like each others' word. They will be more successful even for better business outcomes.
Alright, that's great. So with all this information in mind, where do you think we can start?
I think assessing your own organization, the maturity of the organizations on both disciplines. Right. From an IT perspective, how mature are you? From an operations perspective with... Do you have a CMDB in place? Do you have an asset management strategies in place, all those are great strategies that need to be extended back into Dev. From the operations' perspective, it's very important to have a longer term understanding of how those applications are being used. Running the whole life cycle management capability. Having the true value, so that you're not rewarding developers from just starting and stopping. You need to make sure they are rewarded over a longer period of time. I think that's a cultural change at management level. Taking on a broader prospective in terms of what IT is trying to accomplish for the sake of the business itself.
Yeah, so I think there is one thing that I would obviously look at is how fast you are developing something, and then what happens after that.
If we just look at like, you know, just look at how much time each piece is taking in the life cycle of your application from the beginning to the end. Then you will see, like where, where the bottlenecks are. And basically the reasons for these bottlenecks are we just mentioned because of collaboration, because of process alignment and all these things. Or just have to start like, you know, small steps. Maybe smaller steps like okay, maybe we can align what is on the an upside, maybe, take some of the information and put it on the application side, bring the configurations, your infrastructure details and put them in the, you know, your source code management for example.
Right.
Or something like that. That way developers know what is on the you know? Operations sites.
Right.
So that I'm whatever I'm doing I'm doing the right thing the right thing the right way. So that operations will trust me, because now we are aligned
You got it right. On the Dev side making sure that the test teams and development teams are working closely aligned so that as quick as you're finding issues that need to be addressed, the developers are getting rework notification, built-in. So aligning your independent, your development platforms, so that they have a best practice automation and leveraging, all that automation capabilities on the inside and making sure that same data it is visible to the operation side as well.
Exactly, I mean you know you can visit hp.com or collab.net, to see like what our partnership, where we going with this thing. There are more webinars and other events that are coming up on this topic. And again, DevOps is not just a tool, or a process, it's very much everything people process and technology all together coming on to, you know, for better business outcomes for business and idea alignment and whatnot. So that's what DevOps is and do you want to add anything.
Right. So we have dedicated page on our website
Or it, it helps whenever we find best practices between the two organizations. They're both large both constantly moving around. Its collab.net/hp. It's a great place to just go and check in to see what's new, what's out there, activities around the world, both local and on the web are all kind of shared there. The goal is really to make the business more agile with quality development efforts.
Yes, what we are doing, one thing you can check is HP discover. That is happening, that would be June sometime June in Vegas. You can come visit and and attend the sessions that are dedicated DevOps sessions. And since we with the partnership, collaborative partnership and also some internal innovations that we are doing here, we can really help you to solve your problems, so come visit HP Discover in Vegas and learn and see what you can do.How we can benefit from these conversations.
Well, this has been some great information about DevOps, thanks for joining me again again today guys.
Thank you.
Alright, thank you.
This has been the cross roads a production of CMC media and CMC Crossroads. For more videos like this, visit us on the web at cmcrossroads.com. I'm Patrick Egan, publisher of the Configuration Management Journal.
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