How DevOps can 'prevent critical issues' by making enterprise IT 'more fluid and agile'
Harley-Davidson and Bristow Helicopters tell Computing about the huge potential they see in DevOps
Twelve months ago, DevOps was barely on the radar for many IT leaders, but since then the concept of development and operations teams collaborating as one has gained more and more traction.
Microsoft made the case for DevOps during its recent Build 2015 developers conference in San Francisco, demonstrating that it's now very much on the enterprise agenda. DevOps was also a hot topic at ServiceNow's recent Knowledge 15 conference.
"I don't think there's any clear consensus on what DevOps actually is, but I think the principle of DevOps makes a lot of sense," Adil Ahmed, director of information architecture and knowledge systems at helicopter transport services firm Bristow Group told Computing at the ServiceNow event in Las Vegas.
He argued that many of the problems that plague enterprise IT are due to a lack of co-operation between development and operations teams.
"If you take the example of critical issues like systems being down, operations not being able to run, a lot of that happens because there's not enough collaboration and co-operation between the operations and the development teams," said Ahmed.
"So just the idea of getting those two organisations to talk more frequently and collaborate is a positive thing for the delivery of quality solutions," he added.
Ahmed believes businesses are increasingly attracted to DevOps because the model's "fluidity" is well suited to cloud-based computing.
"I think the way in-house solutions are delivered in the enterprise has changed in the last 10 years. You see a lot more systems where the IT organisation is currently doing more configuration than customisation or development; we're writing less code generally than we were 10 to 15 years ago," Ahmed explained.
"That means that the idea of having development functions distinct from the operations function, that line is already blurred to some extent, so it's almost a natural progression to say that Dev and Ops have to work more closely together," he continued.
Ahmed went on to point out how "sometimes nowadays the teams that are developing the solution also manage the release and support", and argued that this brings benefits "in that you can scale out your organisation if your developers know how to operate the solution and support it".
Harley-Davidson is another company that recognises the potential benefits to be gained from DevOps, especially when it comes to agile software development.
"You're hearing that term being thrown around a lot more than it was a year ago," systems manager Jim Keene told Computing, revealing how the firm "definitely sees the opportunity" in a DevOps deployment.
Keene described how Harley-Davidson's deployment of ServiceNow ITSM tools has helped to put DevOps onto the company's IT agenda.
"What we've done through ServiceNow is connect technical components to the business, giving us more transparency into what's run in the business, giving us the impact if we change it or make a new release," he explained.
"So I think that people can see an opportunity with the software if we were to introduce some techniques like DevOps to be more fluid and agile in the work we do," Keene added.
However, Keene admitted that while Harley-Davidson isn't yet quite ready for a full-scale DevOps rollout, it's certainly on the cards.
"We're not there yet, but there's some buzz at Harley-Davidson and we think we realise we're in a way more flexible position with the software than we were a year ago," he concluded.