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Follow UsBANGALORE, INDIA: With the rising proliferation of mobile devices, workforce across verticals, including BFSI, manufacturing, retail and services are increasingly demanding agile solutions enabling access to content and applications on mobile platforms.
Additionally, rising adoption of cloud infrastructure and virtualization is further fueling the requirement for high volume of app releases by business stakeholders, compelling CIOs to revise Software Development LifeCycle (SDLC) to enable continuous delivery.
As a result, SDLC needs to be more efficient in order to drive better collaboration between Development and Operations.
To understand more about DevOps and how DevOps methodologies will help CIOs improve application development and delivery to accelerate innovation, CIOL interacted with Sumal Karunanayake, VP, Application Delivery, Asia Pacific and Japan, CA Technologies. Excerpts:
CIOL: What is your definition of DevOps?
Sumal Karunanayake: We define DevOps as the collaboration between development and operations in seamlessly running the SDLC from design through to production with the capability to continuously feedback data from production back into the SDLC.
This collaboration starts with Ops and Development aligning with the LOB at design stage, ensuring there is a focus on quality and speed in development and runs through the SLDC with continuous delivery all the way into production where monitoring of the application is fed back into the SDLC to optimize future development.
CIOL: How will DevOps methodologies help CIOs improve application development and delivery to accelerate innovation?
SK: Rising proliferation of mobile devices and BYOD is compelling CIOs to adopt solutions which can be easily accessed on mobile platforms round the clock. DevOps originated with a focus on continuous integration and delivery where development and operations teams work together with the single goal of agile delivery to production. However, development and operations teams need to keep innovating.
They need to hit quality goals, lower maintenance costs and focus on the issues that matter most to their customers. Efficient, actionable, fast feedback (provided in part by analytics) will separate the high performers from the low performers.
CIOL: How do you address critical DevOps challenges to help IT accelerate innovation?
SK: We see the critical DevOps challenges as falling into the following:
* Lack of collaboration - Misalignment of outcomes/objectives between development and release operations
* Lack of automation to provide a continuous delivery/integration from SDLC to production
* Disconnected production monitoring data - Lack of real time feedback loop from production into SDLC for SDLC to leverage real world data of the application performance.
We believe that addressing these three critical challenges through a well-defined process in your SDLC will go a long way. Ensure you have your release management process well defined first.
Second, look to automating the release of your apps/artifacts through the SDLC (strive for continuous delivery). Third, focus on compressing your testing time by "shifting left" your testing into the development phase. This way the output from dev will be "almost" defect free and your testing becomes a "tick in the box". Fourth and lastly, always have a robust application performance management strategy and tool set.
The data you collect in production will be your savior when looped back into the SDLC so you learn from the application behaviors when running it through the SDLC.
CIOL: Does SDLC play an important role to drive better collaboration between development and operations? If yes, how?
SK: The SDLC will be an important function within the whole DevOps process. By adopting principles such as "shift left" and continuous delivery, which are pre-production functions, you have a much better chance of achieving your objectives through DevOps. Collaboration comes down to procedural and process oriented behavior.
DevOps is a cultural transformation project which is enabled by technology. If you do not get your process and cultural elements correct, it will be just another industry term.
CIOL: What is the hardest and more time consuming task in between development/collaboration?
SK: Assuming you are 100 percent defect free and you are running through your SDLC efficiently, then the biggest time consuming aspect of getting your app to production is the release management process. We have a maturity curve where we rank organizations versus their maturity.
This is determined by scales which start at zero, where there is no process defined and everything is done manually and through the use of scripts. You would be surprised how many large global companies are at this level. The scale goes all the way to organizations that have fully automated release process and have minimum dependency on scripting.
The biggest issues around time consumption are when applications are released into production or even during the phases of the SDLC and they just don't work. The diagnostics and search for root causes is what takes the most time and we haven't even talked about the cost and business impact of these issues.
CIOL: Why does DevOps makes sense for Indian organizations?
SK: Today, India is one of the highly dense markets with continuously increasing mobile work force. Further, growing adoption of cloud and virtualization technologies have been resulting into greater demand for solutions to access content and applications. On the other hand, organizations are demanding more customized solutions in order to reduce overall capex in IT investments.
DevOps offer opportunities for Indian CIOs to speed up the overall Software Development Life Cycle to be more innovative through application innovation to cater to changing business requirements.
CIOL: What's your view on the global and Indian DevOps markets?
SK: As DevOps offers a significant win-win opportunity to key agencies including application developers, IT operations, and overall organization business, DevOps is considered to be the top IT priorities.
Though DevOps is relatively new to the Indian market, its origins in Europe with rapid take up in North America, enterprises in Asia are rapidly embracing and hedging a lot of its application development strategies around it.
CIOL: What's your view on rising adoption of cloud infrastructure and virtualization?
SK: The advent and proliferation of cloud and IaaS, virtualization etc., is a key driver to running a more efficient SDLC and certainly augers well for adoption of DevOps. Having access to test cloud, or dev clouds etc and having access to infrastructure "on tap" is a critical aspect in a world where time to market will decide the success of your app or project.
However, this access to "on tap" infrastructure only assists when it comes to constraints around infrastructure. It does not help you when it comes to access to dependent applications or subject matter experts or the speed at which you run through the SDLC or quality of the output. These things will be materially benefited by the adoption of principles such as Service Virtualization and Dev Ops.