'High velocity delivery' of DevOps enables innovation and compliance to go hand-in-hand

Justin Arbuckle, vice president EMEA and chief enterprise architect at Chef, tells Computing that DevOps ends the either/or conundrum of balancing innovation with compliance

Deploying a DevOps-based approach to IT strategy renders the requirement to choose between innovation and compliance obsolete by introducing "high velocity delivery" to coding, benefiting both organisations and their customers.

That's according to Justin Arbuckle, vice president EMEA and chief enterprise architect at IT automation firm Chef, who was speaking to Computing ahead of his scheduled apperance at the upcoming Computing DevOps Summit 2015.

"DevOps is an operating model for IT. It's an operating model which has implications for how we build teams and their culture and the culture in the organisation. How we structure the work we do, how we make it easy and how we automate high velocity delivery to the customer," he explained.

Arbuckle described how safety and compliance in coding have traditionally been viewed as barriers to innovation

"Historically what we thought was that compliance and innovation are separate things," he said.

"Yes we can be innovative and we can be delivering product and moving super-fast, but what we've come to believe as an industry is if you do that you tend to be less safe and tend to be less compliant," Arbuckle continued, before arguing how "DevOps completely turns this philosophy on its head" because it allows for automation of code.

"Imagine that you can translate any compliance requirement into code. So you could translate the requirements to ensure that code is reviewed before it goes to production; you could automate all of that and define those requirements in code," he said.

What this means, Arbuckle told Computing, is that because everything, including compliance, is code "everything is then subject to a higher velocity software development process".

Essentially, introducing a DevOps-based strategy means compliance and innovation can sit together side by side, he explained.

"What that means is whenever you are deploying requirements - let's say you make a square on a screen with a red button which says accept - at the same time you're deploying that red button, what you're also deploying is your new security policy, it's all code, it doesn't make any difference," Arbuckle said.

That, he told Computing, means "everything is code" and leads to a "a high velocity and agile software delivery process" which means "you're able to deploy and iterate very fast" from both a compliance and an innovation perspective.

According to Arbuckle, this DevOps approach fundamentally alters the process of software development for the better by being able to combine compliance and innovation.

"What happens is we come from a position where innovation and compliance were mutually exclusive, you had to pick one or the other to a position where the rate at which you're able to innovate is the same rate at which you're able to achieve compliance," he said.

"Because compliance is code like everything else and compliance improves the rates at which you're deploying software, because when you're deploying software you should be deploying improvements as part of the process anyway," Arbuckle concluded.

Computing' s DevOps Summit is on 8 July in London and is FREE for end users. Register here.