Thursday, June 16, 2016

451 analyst Berkholz on how DevOps, automation and orchestration combine for continuous apps delivery

The next BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer thought leadership discussion focuses on the burgeoning trends around DevOps and how that’s translating into new types of IT infrastructure that both developers and operators can take advantage of.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. 

To learn more about trends and developments in DevOps, micro services, containers, and the new direction for composable infrastructure, we’re joined by Donnie Berkholz, Research Director at 451 Research, and he’s based in Minneapolis. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Why are things changing so much for apps deployment infrastructure? Why is DevOps newly key for software development? And why are we looking for “composable infrastructure?”

Berkholz: It’s a good question. There are a couple of big drivers behind it. One of them is cloud, probably the biggest one, because of the scale and transience that we have to deal with now, with virtual machines (VMs) appearing and disappearing on such a rapid basis.

Berkholz
We have to have software, processes, and cultures that support that kind of new approach, and IT is getting more-and-more demands for scale and to do more from the line of business. They're not getting more money or people, and they have to figure out what’s the right approach to deal with this. How can we scale and how can we do more and how can we be more agile?

DevOps is the approach that’s been settled on. One of the big reasons behind that is the automation. That’s one of what I think of as the three pillars of DevOps, which are culture, automation, and measurement.

Automation is what lets you move from this metaphor of cattle versus pets, moving from the pet side of it, where you carefully name and handcraft each server, to a cattle mindset, where you're thinking about fleets of servers and about services rather than individual servers, VMs, containers, or what have you. You can have syste
ms administrators maintaining 10,000 VMs, rather than 100 or 150 servers by hand. That’s what automation gets you.

More with less

So you're doing more with less. Then, as I said, they're also getting demands from the business to be more agile and deliver it faster, because the businesses all want to compete with companies like Netflix or Zenefits, the Teslas of the world, the software-defined organizations. How can they be more agile, how can they become competitive, if they're a big insurance company or a big bank?

DevOps is one of the key approaches behind that. You get the automation, not just on the server side, but on the application-delivery pipeline, which is really a critical aspect of it. You're moving toward this continuous delivery approach, and being able to move a step beyond agile to bring agile all the way through to production and to deploy software, maybe even on every comment, which is the far end of DevOps. There are a lot of organizations that aren’t there yet, but they're taking steps toward that, toward moving from deployments every three months or six months to every few weeks.
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Gardner: So the vision of having that constant iterative process, continuous development, continuous test, continuous deployment -- at the same time being able to take advantage of these new cloud models -- it’s still kind of a tricky equation for people to work out.

What is it that we need to put in place that allows us to be agile as a development organization and to be automated and orchestrated as an operations organization? How can we make that happen practically?

Berkholz: It always goes back to three things -- people, process, and technology. From the people perspective, what I have run into is that there are a lot of organizations that have either development or operational groups, where some of them just can't make this transition.
IT is going through this kind of existential crisis of moving from being a cost center to fighting shadow IT, fighting bring your own device (BYOD), trying to figure out how to bring that all into the fold.

They can't start thinking about the business impacts of what they're doing. They're focused on keeping the lights on, maintaining the servers, writing the code, and being able to make that transition to focusing on what the business needs. How am I helping the company is the critical step from an individual level, but also from an organizational level.

IT is going through this kind of existential crisis of moving from being a cost center to fighting shadow IT, fighting bring your own device (BYOD), trying to figure out how to bring that all into the fold. How they do so is this transition toward IT as a service is the way we think about it. IT becoming more like a service provider in their own right, pulling in all these external services and providing a better experience in house.

If you think about shadow IT, for example, you think about developers using a credit card to sign-up for some public cloud or another. That’s all well and good, but wouldn’t it be even nicer if they didn’t have to worry about the billing, the expensing, the payments, and all that stuff, because IT already provided that for them. That’s where things are going, because that’s the IT-as-a-service provider model.

Gardner: People, process, technology, and existential issues. The vendors are also facing existential issues, things and changing so fast, and they provide technology, the people and the process which is up to the enterprise to figure out. What's happening on the technology side, and how are the vendors reacting to allow enterprises to then employ the people and put in place the processes that will bring us to this better DevOps automated reality? What can we put in place technically to make this possible?

Two approaches

Berkholz: It goes back to two approaches -- one coming in from the development side and one coming in from the operational side.

From a development side, we're talking about things like continuous-delivery pipelines --  what does the application delivery process look like? Typically, you'd start with something like continuous integration (CI).

Just moving toward an automated testing environment, every commit you make, you're testing the code base against it one way or another. This is a big transition for people to make, especially as you think about moving the next step to continuous delivery, which is not just testing the code base, but testing the full environment and being ready to deploy that to production with every commit, or perhaps on a daily basis.
Just moving toward an automated testing environment, every commit you make, you're testing the code base against it one way or another.

So that's a continuous-integration, continuous-delivery approach using CI servers. There's a pretty well-known open-source one called Jenkins. There are many other examples of as-a-service options around the prime options. That tends to be step one, if you're coming in from the development side.

Now, on the operational side, automation is much more about infrastructure as code. It's really the core tenet, and this is embodied by configuration management software like Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Salt, maybe CFEngine, and the approaches defining server configuration and code and maintaining it in version control, just like you would maintain the software that you're building in version control. You can scale it easily because you know exactly how a server is created.

You can ask if that's one mail server or is it 20? It doesn’t really matter. I'm just running the same code again to deploy a new VM or to deploy onto a bare-metal environment or to deploy a new container. It’s all about that infrastructure-as-code approach using configuration-management tools. When you bring those two things together, that’s what enables you to really do continuous delivery.

You’ve got the automated application delivery pipeline on the top and you've got the automated server environment on the bottom. Then, in the middle, you’ve got things like service virtualization, data virtualization, and continuous-integration servers all letting you have an extremely reliable and reproducible and scalable environment that is the same all the way from development to production.
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Gardner: And when we go to infrastructure as code, when we go to software-based everything. There's a challenge getting there, but there are also some major paybacks. When you feed-up to analyze your software, when you can replicate things rapidly, when you can deploy to a cloud model that works for your economic or security requirements, you get lot of benefits.

Are we seeing those yet, Donnie?

Berkholz: One of the challenges is that we know there are benefits, but they're very challenging to quantify. When you talk about the benefit of delivering a solution to market faster than your competitors, the benefit is that you're still in business. The benefit is that you’re Netflix and you're not Blockbuster. The benefit is that you’re Tesla and you’re not one of the big-three car manufacturers. Tesla, for example, can ship an update to its cars that let them self-drive on-the-fly for people who already purchased the car.
If you want to survive, you’re going to have to take this DevOps mindset, so that you can be more agile, not just as a software group, but as a business.

You can't really quantify the value of that easily. What you can quantify is natural selection and action. There's no mandatory requirement that any company survive or that any company can make the transition to software-defined. But, if you want to survive,  you’re going to have to take this DevOps mindset, so that you can be more agile, not just as a software group, but as a business.

Gardner: Perhaps one of the ways we can measure this is that we used to look at IT spend as a percentage of capital spend for an enterprise. Many organizations, over the past 20 or 30, years found themselves spending 50 percent or more of their capital expenditures on IT.

I think they'd like to ratchet back. If we go to IT as a service, if we pay for things at an operations level, if we only pay for what we use, shouldn't we start to see a fairly significant decrease in the total IT spend, versus revenue or profit for most organizations?

Berkholz: The one underlying factor is how important software is to your company. If that importance is growing, you're probably going to spend more as a percentage. But you're going to be generating more margin as a result of that. That's one of the big transitions that are happening, the move from IT as a cost center to IT as a collaborator with the business.

The move is away from your traditional old CIO view of we're going to keep the lights on. A lot of companies are bringing in Chief Digital Officers, for example, because the CIO wasn't taking this collaborative business view. They're either making the transition or they're getting left behind.

Spending increase

I think we'll see IT spend increase as a percentage, because companies are all realizing that, in actuality, they're software companies or they're becoming software companies. But as I said, they are going to be generating a lot more value on top of that spend.

To your point about OPEX and buying things for the service, the piece of advice I always give to companies is the saying, "How many of these things that you're doing are significant differentiators for your company?" Is it really a differentiator for your company to be an expert at automating a delivery pipeline, to be an expert at automating your servers, to be an expert at setting up file sharing, to be an expert at setting up an internal chat server? None of those, right?

Why not outsource them to people who are experts and to people who do generate that as their core differentiator and their core value creator and focus on the things that your business cares about.

Gardner: Let's get back to this infrastructure equation. We're hearing about composable infrastructure, software-defined data center (SDDC), micro services, containers and, of course, hybrid cloud or hybrid computing. If I'm looking to improve my business agility where do I look to in terms of understanding my future infrastructure partners? Is my IT organization just a broker and are they going to work with other brokers? Are we looking at a hierarchy of brokering with some sort of a baseline commoditized set of services underneath?
Everything is becoming polyglot or heterogeneous, and the only way to cope with that is to really focus on composability.

So, where do we go in terms of knowing who the preferred vendors are. I guess we're sort of looking at a time when no one got fired for from buying IBM, for example. Everyone is saying Amazon is going to take over the world, but I've heard that about other vendors in the past, and it didn't pan out. This is a roundabout way of saying when you want to compose infrastructure, how do you keep choice, how to keep from getting locked in, how do you find a way to be in a market at all times?

Berkholz: Composability is really key. We see a lot of IT organizations. As you said, they used to just buy Big Blue, for example, at their IBM shops. That's no longer a thing in the way that it used to be. There's a lot more fragmentation in terms of technology, programming languages, hardware, JavaScript toolkits, and databases.

Everything is becoming polyglot or heterogeneous, and the only way to cope with that is to really focus on composability. Focus on multi-vendor solutions, focus on openness, opening APIs, and open-source as well, are incredibly important in this composable world, because everything has to be able to piece together.

But the problem is that when you give traditional enterprises a bunch of pieces, it's like having kids just create a huge mess on the floor. Where do you even get started? That's one of the challenges they need to have. The way I always think about it is what are enterprises looking for? They're looking for a Lego castle, right? They don’t want the Lego pieces, and they don't want like that scene in The Lego Movie where the father glues all the blocks together. They don't want to be stuck. That's the old monolithic world.

The new composable world is where you get that castle and you can take off the tower and put on a new tower if you want to. But you're not given just the pieces; you're given not just something that is composable, but something that is pre-composed for you, for your use. case. So that generates value and looks like what we used to think about reference architectures, for example, being something sitting on a PowerPoint slides with kind of a fancy diagram.

It’s moving more toward reference architectures in the form of code, where it’s saying, "Here's a piece of code that’s ready to deploy and that’s enabled through things like infrastructure as code."

Gardner: Or a set of APIs.

Ready to go

Berkholz: Exactly. It’s enabled by having all of that stuff ready to go, ready to build in a way that wasn’t possible before. The best-case scenario before was, "Here’s a virtual appliance; have fun with that." Now, you can distribute the code and they can roll that up, customize it, take a piece out, put a piece in, however they want to.

Gardner: Before we close out, Donnie, any words of advice for organizations back to that cultural issue -- probably the more difficult one really? You have a lot of choices of technology, but how you actually change the way people think and behave among each other is always difficult. DevOps, leading to composable infrastructure, leading to this sort of services brokering economy, for lack of a better word, or marketplace perhaps.

What are you telling people about how to make that cultural shift? How do organizations change while still keeping the airplane flying so to speak?
You can’t do it as a big bang. That's absolutely the worst possible way to go about it.

Berkholz: You can’t do it as a big bang. That's absolutely the worst possible way to go about it. If you think about change management, it’s a pretty well-studied discipline at this point. There's an approach I prefer from a guy named John Kotter who has written books about change management. He lays out an eight- or nine-step process of how to make these changes happen. The funny thing about it is that actually doing the change is one of the last steps.

So much of it is about building buy-in, about generating small wins, about starting with an independent team and saying, "We're going to take the mobile apps team and we're going to try a continuous delivery over there. We're not going to stop doing everything for six months as we are trying to roll this out across the organization, because the business isn’t going to stand for that."
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They're going to say, "What are you doing over there? You're not even shipping anything. What are you messing around with?" So, you’ve got to go piece by piece. Let’s say, start by rolling out continuous integration and slowly adding more and more automated tests to it, while keeping the manual testers alongside, so that you're not dropping all of the quality that you had before. You're actually adding more quality by adding the automation and slowly converting those manual testers over to the engineers on test.

That’s the key to it. Generate small wins, start small, and then gradually work your way up as you are able to prove the value to the organization. Make sure while you're doing so that you have executive buy-in. The tool side of things you can start at a pretty small level, but thinking about reorganization and cultural change, if you don’t have executive buy-in, is never going to fly.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

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