Both Traditional Businesses and Businesses Born on The Cloud Can Use DevOps

How does cloud computing support the growing need for DevOps?

The availability of computing infrastructure has been accelerated significantly by cloud computing. Installing a server or virtual machine used to take weeks; now it only takes a few seconds. This implies that all the inefficiencies in the remaining phases of the application life cycle, in establishing procedures, and in operational practices, are made obvious by cloud computing.

The speed at which a developer can move through the various steps necessary to get new code into production typically determines how quickly he can make code changes. These processes have all historically been laborious and manual. These prior methods are now apparent to be the main impediments for the speed to market because the infrastructure can be put in place so quickly. Now, a company must discover out how to speed up development operations procedures. DevOps is replacing manual procedures with automated procedures for this reason.

How is DevOps helping organizations on the whole?

DevOps helps both IT organizations and larger businesses. It’s an efficiency practice in IT organizations with making changes, processes much more regularized, so one doesn’t have mistakes made in configuration by manual practice. So, it’s efficient and reduces errors. From the business perspective, it helps because it enables new functionality to get into the marketplace quickly. This helps in extending offerings or responding to competition much more quickly. So, DevOps helps both the IT organization to be sharper and the overall business to be more successful.

Is DevOps best for the born-in-the-cloud businesses? Or can it catalyze the traditional businesses?

DevOps can be used by both born-in-the cloud businesses and traditional businesses. It’s a set of practices that can be applied in any kind of IT setting. But I must add that the line between born-in-the-cloud businesses and traditional businesses is quite blurry, as traditional businesses today need to be much more like born-in-the-cloud businesses. For example, Capital One, a U.S based bank works a lot with credit card transactions and they have really adopted born-in-the-cloud business practices. They have heavily invested towards cloud computing and are offering new services through Amazon Echo. This makes them looks a lot like a born-in-the-cloud business. So, the line between traditional businesses and born-in-the-cloud businesses is actually much blurrier than one might anticipate. And DevOps is appropriate whether you are deploying applications out in a cloud environment or if you are deploying an internal data center. It’s really about how you manage your development processes and operational practices no matter what the center is.

In your opinion, what are the typical challenges IT organizations experience in moving to cloud?

One typical challenge is that organizations think of a cloud environment like outsourced infrastructure and bring traditional architectures and practices to the cloud environment. Though there are servers in the cloud, it operates on a different paradigm. It’s designed to be agile, help in scaling up and down quickly, and can be automated. When we use the same practices that are appropriate for a world where everything was done manually, you are not taking full advantage of the cloud computing capabilities.

The second issue is that many organizations find it challenging to taking on the opportunities for innovation that cloud computing offers. When resources are available, you only pay for what you use, and start launching things much more rapidly while you experiment. You can shut things down if they don’t work. You start to envision new uses and that’s a challenge that many IT organizations have as they don’t have the vision to take on the opportunities for new offerings and innovation.

The third challenge comes when you start to modify the way you operate and think about the opportunities differently. You need to make sure that your organization is up to speed in terms of using those cloud technologies and that means employees need to be skilled and have hands-on knowledge. Organizations have faced this with the rise of personal computer and the shift to the internet, and this is a new environment that they have to get used to, build skills and so forth.

What are the key reasons that digital enterprises make cloud computing a critical foundation for next-gen apps?

Cloud computing makes resources available within minutes and even seconds. It’s highly scalable, so you could build an application and get ten times the user base. If you need ten times the data that you envisioned, it’s not a problem as the pricing model is pay-for-what-you-use. Experimentation and rapid changes sort of enables innovation so those kinds of capabilities are the basis of the offerings of digital enterprises. So, going back to that example I used about Echo, when Capital One launched it, they didn’t know if a hundred people would use it or a hundred thousand. And, if they use the traditional model, that would have been a real problem because of the number of servers you buy. With cloud computing, you scale the resources according to the load. So, a firm like Capital One can launch a new offering confidently and no matter how it goes, they will be able to respond to customer demand.

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