Photo by Rock’n Roll Monkey on Unsplash
The moves sweeping the IT industry are fascinating to watch — DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, Serverless, NoOps — just the other day I saw a Test tool that you can plug into your CI/CD pipeline, that uses AI and Machine Learning to not just automate, but predictively update tests following updates to your application. It’s the first CI/CD tool that’s introduced itself to me by name “Hi, I’m mabl”. It’s incredible to think where this will all go.
So as a modern IT organisation, where do you go with all this. My perspective of the IT industry is changing by the day, but what I’m sure of is the pace will get faster, and we’ll see greater disruption to old roles and responsibilities. From my vantage point every business is a software business. If you think you’re an Insurance business, you’re probably wrong, if you think you’re a Retail business, probably wrong again. In the digital world, unless your business supports Social (media), Mobile, Analytics and Cloud — a much better use of SMAC than the Prodigy — then you’re either at grave risk from the competition (you may not even know who they are), or are an increasingly rare business that can cope without, maybe a cornershop.
Back to this “DevOps” thing. The most amusing story I heard was that of the dev team on one side, wanting to build cool things as fast as they can, hating that ops team over there that slow things down and make things difficult — and an ops team on the other side, wanting to keep things running, limiting change as that’s the biggest cause of failure, and hating that dev team over there that take unnecessary risks.
Photo by Isaac Quick on Unsplash
Obviously this was a fictitious organisation, but the wall is well known, and it needs to come down. But in doing so, before you arrive at harmonious practices operating in DevOps unison, you have roles coming together who may mistrust or underappreciate each other, and if not careful you can start a war.
To become DevOps compliant, you need to recognise this is the biggest culture change in IT since ITIL in the noughties and Agile in the teens. As IT approaches its Twenties (we’ll ignore the 20th century for a minute, sorry Digital Equipment Corporation), managing across the wall is replaced by removing the wall. Once you get your head round that you can install mabl.
Gary Watts
Disclaimer: this article is in no way affiliated with mabl — but I do like robots.
For more from me follow me at https://hackernoon.com/@gary.sa.watts