The Problem With DevOps
DevOps alone is not a silver bullet. While it has no doubt changed the way we work and our expectations of software engineering departments, the promised panacea needs help scaling across all organizations.
Since its inception, the emphasis within DevOps has predominantly been on the "Dev" side of the equation. The question, of course, becomes where does the "Ops" part fit in? For some digital pure players, it seemingly doesn't, hence the advent of NoOps-the complete removal of traditional operations. However, in reality, this solution is unlikely to be the norm for the vast majority of companies. Whereas NoOps has become a banner to circumnavigate the requirements and safety nets of operations teams, DevOps initiatives are still heavily reliant on the infrastructure and services provided by IT operations.
So, what is the net result of this? Operational teams are often left wondering what the benefits of DevOps are for them. Are they something of an afterthought, left to deal with managing applications and clearing up after the developers? It is the operational function that often has to take accountability for the app upon its release-a thankless task in the agile world of software development, where speed and creativity are paramount, while reliability and security take a backseat.
So how do we create a harmony that enables operations to match the agility of development, reacting at speed and at the same time delivering an application without glitches?
Enhancing Agility With Intelligent Automation
Keeping pace with continuous delivery requires development and operations to implement consistent automation. Agility is enhanced by helping dev and ops to play to their strengths and is an inherent part of the new CA Automic One Automation Platform release. It means driving agility across both development and operations to meet the needs of the business. This enables software engineers to increase the speed and scale of application deployment while ensuring stability and a high-quality end-user experience.
With our new release, developers can tap into the scalable capabilities that operational teams need to ensure compliance and control, from the comfort of their own development environment. Now both developers and operations are happy: Developers can focus on writing code and innovating, without needing to spend large amounts of time on building integration hubs, testing environments or other tasks typically associated with an operational process. Meanwhile, operations are happy because they can offer a service to their development teams, confident that their compliance and process requirements are met. That's how intelligent automation helps-driving agility across both dev and ops to truly bring together DevOps as it has always been foreseen.
The CA Automic One Automation Platform also bridges across different silos of automation. Its single intuitive user interface acts as a central point of management for the all the automated processes in the enterprise. Given that Gartner and other analysts state that a major challenge facing enterprises is the proliferation of automation silos, a crucial benefit of the CA Automation portfolio is that an organization can provide a single control point for all automation, regardless of the product(s) being used.
Our latest release facilitates continuous delivery across all technologies, from legacy to modern digital applications, by orchestrating the entire DevOps toolchain and making use of:
- Version control and lifecycle management of automation artifacts: This enables automation objects such as jobs, workflows, and scripts to be easily promoted from development to production. We want automation to not just be an afterthought in production-we want to better integrate it into the DevOps process.
- Automation-as-code: We shift-left automation to the developers, so they can deliver both the application code and the automation code at the same time. Once again, we better integrate automation into the continuous delivery process.
- Critical path management: We have added a powerful intelligence into workflows, which enables dynamic runtime estimations and predicts potential issues with certain paths in the workflow execution. This can, for instance, be extremely valuable when automating financial close processes; closing time is always a source of stress for finance teams, so getting an accurate forecast on execution time is essential. It can also be very helpful to estimate the deployment time of an application and evaluate the risks when releasing into production.
- New integrations: We've incorporated an integration with password vaults to further improve the security of automation, as there is no longer any need to share passwords. Furthermore, there are new integrations with existing CA automation products: Autosys, ESP, CA-7, and CDD. This allows users to extend automation policies into new areas while maintaining their investment in the training and knowledge of existing technologies.
By tightening the alignment between development and operations, our new release enhances intelligent capabilities to provide large-scale, complex environments with the capability of attaining continuous delivery. By bringing greater intelligence to your ops teams, developers are also freed from the shackles of managing releases, instead focusing on the innovation and coding aspects of their roles. Ultimately, this will bring an unprecedented level of consistency, speed, and reliability to your entire enterprise.
