Understanding DevOps (Part 1) - Taking the pain out of application development and delivery

Undeniably, mobile devices are at the centre of how we live and work today. According to IT analyst firm Gartner, consumers worldwide are expected to purchase more than 1.2 billion smartphones and tablets in 2013. Today, these mobile apps are an important conduit for global organisations and even small and medium-sized businesses in interacting with their internal and external customers.

This mobility megatrend is placing increasing pressure on IT organisations to push out higher quality applications at a faster pace than ever before. Within the banking and finance and telecommunications sectors, for example, a delay in delivering applications, or sacrificing on quality for speed, can make a significant difference between high customer churn and increased average revenue per user (ARPU).

In addition to this, the proliferation of cloud and the increasing role of IaaS, SaaS and PaaS in the supply chain of enterprise application development contributes significantly to the changing role of the CIO. The CIO is now performing the role of a ‘broker’ of technology services to the business. As a result, most CIOs are under increasing pressure from the business to provide applications which are more robust and address customer experience requirements in a faster and more cost-effective way.

The single biggest challenge a CIO faces in delivering to this charter is converging the traditionally demarcated lines between development and operations. This zone of demarcation is quite often what contributes to defects, slowness in app delivery, misalignment in business requirements and ultimately, costs associated with running an efficient software development life cycle (SDLC).

To this end, the concept of DevOps (tighter collaboration between development and operations) and practices around this will go towards achieving the goals of the CIO. Although the movement of DevOps is a relatively nascent one, with its origins in Europe and with rapid take-up in North America, enterprises in Asia are rapidly embracing and hedging a lot of their application development strategies around it. Countries such as Australia, India, Korea and China are more aggressively adopting the principles of DevOps - fundamentally due to their technology-centric cultures and markets.

So how does DevOps translate to operational outcomes? This is not a simple ‘plug-and-play’ approach. As with most process-oriented concepts, it comes down to a mixture of qualitative and quantitative initiatives. Specific to DevOps, there needs to be strong leadership espousing the value and benefits (not just IT, but also from the CEO down), and cultural programs which leverage the communication channels such as social media, internal events, cross-functional join-ups, social gatherings etc. In addition to these qualitative elements, there also needs to be a heightened focus on automation within the SDLC (from a technology perspective) and collaboration from the planning phase within a typical SDLC. So now, instead of development meeting with the business to determine requirements, the requirements gathering phase will also involve operations as well.

As with most doctrines of this kind, the success of this is fundamentally transformational to a business. However, gauging success and putting in place a plan or strategy to achieve success are entirely different challenges. The initial findings from markets that have been early adopters of this approach are encouraging and certainly validate the hypothesis that DevOps will be a transformational play.

In my interaction with CIOs daily in this region, they are increasingly identifying DevOps as one of their top IT priorities this year. DevOps presents a win-win-win proposition - for application developers, IT operations and your organisation’s business. As disruptive trends continue to pile pressure on organisations to deliver everything faster, better and more cost-effectively, adopting DevOps will likely become a necessity, and not a nice to have.

In the next part of this series, we will discuss some of the best practices in implementing a DevOps strategy as it relates to SDLC and some of the pitfalls, based on our experience, to avoid.

*Sumal Karunanayake is Vice President, Application Delivery, Asia Pacific and Japan, at CA Technologies.