DevOps Intelligence for Modern Enterprise

Leader’s guide to faster business results

Summary

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The technology shifts in the last few years are forcing enterprises to transform themselves into a Digital Enterprise. This is not just a technological need but also a critical business requirement. The software driven nature of digital enterprise requires a transformation that puts developers and IT at the center of innovation, putting agility at the core of this transformation. The key component to drive agility through IT is insights to remove any bottlenecks.

This executive guide will showcase the main pillars of modern agile enterprises helping business leaders better understand the dynamics of this transformation and the core component, DevOps Intelligence, needed for a successful transformation

Introduction

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oday’s business landscape is driven by manyfactors including globalization, ubiquitousinternet, mobile as the gateway to customerexperience and social as an important channelfor customer success. The ground underneaththe enterprises is changing rapidly, pushingevery organization to put software at the centerof their business strategy. This shift is not justmandated out of competitive threat fromcompanies in the same vertical but also by thethreats posed by technology companies andcompanies in adjacent verticals. Imagine atechnology company disrupting the car andhotel industry without owning any assets. Itwouldn’t have been possible without softwarebecoming the backbone of the modernbusiness supply chain. Software driven businessis not a buzzword but the new reality in today’smarket.

Even though software is part of manybusinesses for a long time now, it has taken anew meaning now. Software has moved fromaugmenting business in the periphery to beingthe very foundation of any business. This hasresulted in IT being the gatekeeper of computeresources to playing an active role in drivinginnovation. The key metric for success in thesoftware driven business is how fast an idea canbe taken to the market as a product. This is asupply chain optimization problem in thesoftware delivery context. How do yousmoothen the software delivery supply chain,removing all factors contributing friction, inorder to accelerate the time to market?

The traditional IT is full of bottlenecks whetherit is the infrastructure, people or process.

IT transformation from being a gatekeeper to enabler of innovation requires a different approach that breaks down silos and removes bottlenecks to optimize software delivery supply chain.

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In this executive guide, we will talk about thefour pillars of the modern enterprise IT that arecritical for transforming the business to becompetitive in the fast changing technologylandscape.

Four Pillars of Agile Enterprise

Elastic Infrastructure

Collaborative Culture

Automating Delivery

Actionable Intelligence

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Modernizing enterprise IT to be more agile is acritical business requirement driven, in manycases, by the competition taking advantage ofthe new technologies to reach the market fasterand achieve greater customer satisfaction. Thefour pillars of this transformation journey are:

• Elastic Infrastructure• Collaborative Culture• Automating Delivery• Actionable Intelligence

Modern Enterprise IT requires a rethink fromshrink wrapped software sitting on desktopcomputers to elastic services that can beaccessed from anywhere in the world on anydevice. In the following sections, we will discussthese four components required for thesuccessful transformation.

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Elastic Infrastructure

The underlying fabric to deliver agility to themodern enterprise is the elastic infrastructureprovided by cloud computing. The servicearchitecture for applications and the need todeliver value at global scale requires theseamless elasticity to scale. The self servicenature of the cloud also removes an importantbottleneck in the resource provisioning,accelerating the time to market significantly.Even though cost is often cited as the reason tomove to cloud, it is the agility offered by cloudthat provides the maximum value.

With the cloud model for the underlyinginfrastructure, there are many significantadvantages:

• Low capital investment to jumpstart thetransformation

• Usage based billing gives flexibility to failcheaply, leading to experimentation andeventual innovation at a lower cost andfaster rate

• The pathway from idea to code to customervalue lacks the usual bottlenecks oftraditional IT, giving significant agility

The more consumer centric technologicaladvances are shifting the usage models towardsinstant gratification, the impact of thisexpectation transcends B2C to even B2B. This

adds tremendous pressure on the business todeliver at a speed expected by their customers.The elastic infrastructure provided by cloud notonly helps deliver value faster but also scaleswell to meet the needs of globalized businesslandscape.

In the last few years, public cloud services likeAWS, Azure and Google Cloud has gainedtremendous adoption inside enterprises. Fororganizations not comfortable with moving topublic cloud and those who are constrained byregulatory needs, private cloud offerings likeOpenStack is filling in the need. Mostenterprises take a hybrid cloud approach toelastic infrastructure with a management planeseamlessly managing the underlyinginfrastructure services.

Containers, driven mostly by the success ofDocker, has gained tremendous traction in thelast two years. Success of containerorchestration engines like Kubernetes is helpingto drive the container adoption. Containers areseen as the most efficient way to encapsulatethe applications and drive infrastructureefficiency, which also translate into increasedagility.

Even though the elastic infrastructure brings in certain degree of agility, it is not enough to maximize the ROI of transformation towards an agile enterprise.

The silos and bottlenecks in the culture andprocesses makes the gains made from elasticinfrastructure to be sub-optimal.

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Collaborative Culture

The biggest bottleneck in the software valuedelivery lies in the boundaries of the rolesdefined for various stakeholders. The lack ofunderstanding of the needs and pressures ofvarious stakeholders from business todevelopers to IT operations is the next biggestbottleneck in the software supply chain afterresource provisioning. The key challenge facedby the IT leaders is to foster a culture ofcollaboration across the entire value chain,especially between developers and IToperations.

DevOps emerged as the solution to removesilos in the culture and bottlenecks in theprocess. Gartner has predicted that DevOps willmove from niche to mainstream this yearadopted by large number of enterprises.However, there is still significant confusionabout the real meaning and value of DevOps.This lack of understanding is hurting evenorganizations embracing DevOps leading tosuboptimal results.

The key concept underlying this culture of collaboration is empathy, the need to understand the constraints and pressures of various teams involved in the value creation.

Such an understanding will accelerate the valuedelivery by removing potential bottlenecksthrough a robust feedback loop (discussed inthe last sub-section).

DevOps is about improving a culture ofcollaboration (discussed in this subsection) byremoving the sources of friction throughautomation (discussed in the next sub-section).

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Collaborative Culture

To illustrate this point better, let us considertwo of the important stakeholders in thesoftware delivery chain, developers and IToperations. From the very definition of theirroles, their goals are different. Developers wantto take their code to production faster,requiring continuous change whereas IToperations is focussed on reliability andstability, completely opposite to developerneeds. In the traditional IT, this is a clear sourceof friction leading to finger pointing andeventual slowdown of value delivery. Iforganizations can foster a culture ofcollaboration where IT operations understandthe needs of the developers and developersunderstand the pressures faced by IToperations keeping the lights on, the source offriction can be minimized. This not only requiresempathy to understand each other but alsocross functional training. IT operations shouldbe able to code if the need arises anddevelopers should be able to understand theintricacies of IT operations and lend a helpinghand whenever necessary.

Such a cultural change is not easy but itrequires a mandate from the top leadership.This is not something that will happen overnightand the culture of mutual trust and crossfunctional roles will take time. But it is a criticalstep in the enterprise transformation journeywith no shortcuts. The leadership is expected toprovide necessary resources and support tofoster this culture of collaboration across all thestakeholders, including the business. Thecooperation between the developers and IToperations will remove another criticalbottleneck in the software delivery chain.

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Automating Delivery

DevOps cultural transformation requiresautomation as a key building block as itremoves many factors contributing frictionbetween developers and IT operations. Theprocess of automating the delivery creates anagile pathway (Delivery Pipeline, according toindustry terminology) on top of the elasticinfrastructure. In other words, cloud is thecanvas on top of which DevOps enables theagile pathway for software delivery. Without theelasticity and self service nature of cloud,automation will be suboptimal withoutcompletely removing the source of frictionbetween the developers and operations.

DevOps automation involves connecting all thetools used by the stakeholders across variousstages of software delivery, dev, test, releaseand production, along with the deploymenttargets to form an agile pathway for softwaredelivery. Automation, not only leads to theelimination of human errors but also optimizesthe handover of the code for deploymentacross multiple stages by removing manysources of friction. Such a seamless deliverypathway greatly speeds up the delivery,reducing the time to market even further.

The quest for automating the delivery pathwaystarted with Continuous Integration, helpingdevelopers maximize their embrace of agile

methodologies. Eventually, ContinuousDelivery/Deployment became the next stage inmaturity for organizations wanting to bridge thedevelopers and production environments.While tools like Jenkins help solve part of theautomation puzzle, the key to maximum agilitylies in automating all the tools that are part ofthe software delivery chain. Whether it is coderepos like Github or tools like Jira or codequality tools like Sonar or monitoring tools, it isimportant to bring them all together under anunified automation strategy.

One of the mistakes IT leaders make in their quest to embrace DevOps is to pick an end to end platform and put an organization wide mandate asking stakeholders to embrace the platform.

This is a critical mistake that usually leads tofailures in their DevOps initiatives. Developersand operations want to use the tools they arecomfortable with already and which they usedaily in their work. Mandating them to embracenewer tools adds friction, defeating the veryculture of collaboration painstakingly cultivatedover several months. Therefore, the keyDevOps strategy is to let the stakeholders usethe tools of their choice and find a platformthan can provide an agile pathway on top ofthem through automation.

The automation of the delivery pipeline fostersthe culture of collaboration while also providingthe developers and operations with the toolsthey like and a deployment target that suits theworkloads. With the right mix of automationand cultural change, IT leaders can reapsubstantial benefits in delivering value to theirbusiness.

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Actionable Intelligence

As organizations embrace on their enterprisemodernization journey, they overlook the mostcritical component in the transformation toagile enterprise is the need for intelligence andthe actions that can be taken based on theintelligence. More often, insights on top of theagile pathway has become an afterthought andmostly confined to collecting metrics andoverlaying it with visualization. When you thinkof Intelligence as one of the core pillars of

Modern Enterprise, it is important to note thatone has to go beyond using data as foundationfor monitoring to correlating the metrics acrossall tools, applying the right context and gainingactionable insights. Intelligence is the mostcritical asset that helps maximize the benefits ofthe modern software delivery stack.

Whether it is about correlating the code repolike Github with code quality tool like Sonar andgaining valuable insights like how the codequality is getting impacted as developers speedup delivering code or the impact of a build onproduction environments or technical debtreduction or average cycle time, making senseof metrics from all the tools that are part of thesoftware supply chain defines the success orfailure of a project. Without this intelligence,organizations may be able to move the bits ofsoftware faster but the outcomes may besuboptimal.

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Actionable Intelligence

Whether you are an engineering manager prDevOps admin or product owner or ITmanager, DevOps Intelligence should provideyou with right answers that helps you, as astakeholder in the delivery process, to takedecisions that enhance the business valuedelivered to your organization. Without thisintelligence as the guiding factor, organizationswill not only be draining their critical resourcesbut also be losing out their competitive edge.

A DevOps admin might want to know• Which applications have most patches

applied and how are they trending• Modules experiencing most churn and trend

across releases

An IT Manager will have different concerns suchas• Applications by cost of infrastructure and

trend• Applications experiencing the most failures

and trend

A product owner will need a more holistic lookat issues like• Comparing teams by overall quality and

delivery efficiency• Budget allocation vs spending across teams

An engineering manager overseeingdevelopers will focus on• Productivity and effectiveness of team

members by measuring their contribution torelease and trend over releases

• How is the change to the platform impactingstability and performance and trend

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Actionable Intelligence

The feedback loop should connect every toolthat are part of the software delivery pathwayand provide actionable insights to enablebetter communication and collaboration.

The key to building better quality software lies in catching the problems faster and a continuous feedback loop helps enable such a course correction without investing lots of time and resources into it.

Whatever be your role or the questions youhave as the leader of a team/organization, it iscritical to have DevOps Intelligence necessaryto find the relevant actionable response orrecommendations.

While the pathway brings agility and helpsdeliver software faster, the actionableintelligence enables feedback at every stage ofthe software lifecycle, improving the quality ofthe code to be deployed. The insights gainedhelps deliver better software faster. Theactionable intelligence also plays a critical rolein ensuring the agility as the code travels acrossvarious roles and stages in the agile pathway.Without this critical intelligence, organizationsfail to deliver outcomes driven results,defeating the very purpose of theirtransformation.

The transformation to agile enterprise involvespeople, process and tools but it is about all ofthem working in tandem to maximize thebenefits without creating any new silos orbottlenecks. While the culture of collaborationis specific to an organization, the automationand actionable intelligence are fairly standardand can be easily achieved by encapsulatingindustry best practices in automation and takingadvantage of the intelligence gained throughthe use of a right platform. A successful agileenterprise will build a culture of collaborationby using automation to break silos andbottlenecks while using continuous feedback toenhance collaboration between variousstakeholders. The underlying elasticinfrastructure offered by cloud will provide thenecessary canvas for this transformation.

Even though elastic infrastructure, culture and automation are part of most organization’s modernization journey, actionable intelligence is the critical competitive asset.

Without a right platform to build intelligenceand take the necessary follow-up actions, an“agile” enterprise will still be crawling towardsinnovation.

The agile enterprise is not just about deliveringsoftware faster but it is about delivering bettersoftware faster, maximizing the value for theend customers. In short, it is about removingthe friction to enable seamless softwaredelivery. As a business leader, it is yourresponsibility to remove friction in people,process and tools.

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Conclusion

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CloudMunch Insights

CloudMunch Insights offers DevOpsintelligence that can streamline softwaredelivery process, adding agility and helpingdeliver better software faster. CloudMunchInsights offers key metrics on top of yourdelivery pipeline and helps you gain actionableinsights based on outcomes such as acrosssprints, based on builds, based on roles, etc.. Ithelps managers gain full visibility across teams,accelerating delivery and enhancing time tomarket. Large enterprises can leverageCloudMunch Insights to meet the governanceneeds and help retain complete control overthe software delivery chain.

With the help of DevOps templates,organizations can leverage CloudMunchPlatform to gain DevOps Intelligence with fewclicks. CloudMunch platform works with variouscloud stacks including Cloud Native stacks likeDocker, Kubernetes, Mesosphere and publicclouds like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.

Are you ready to transform yourorganization to Agile enterprise? Thisneed not be hard. With a platform likeCloudMunch platform, automationand continuous feedback loops are fewclicks away. Contact us for a freedemo.

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