Author Gene Kim has a lot to say about the DevOps Movement. He recently published The Phoenix Project as his treatise on exactly how technology organizations can speed development in a way that meets the business needs without all of the infighting and without ignoring stability, reliability and security. Anyone who’s been in technology knows the pain of software developers pitted against IT operations people… each side blaming the other for slow progress and angry business users.
But if you think this is just an IT topic, think again. Companies that deliver through a philosophy of continuous delivery are far more flexible and competitive than companies that manage their technology infrastructure in the traditional nine month to one year conceive-develop-deploy cycles. We’re in a new world where that time period is enough to end the company. Ask Blackberry.
The Way Out
In Gene Kim’s words:
“The way out is DevOps. The starting gun for the DevOps Movement was 2009 when John Allspaw and Paul Hammond, the heads of operations and engineering at Yahoo and Flickr told the world at the Velocity Conference, “We’re doing ten deploys a day.” This was in a world where most people were doing one release every nine months or one a year. After everyone was done fainting in the aisle ways, it really created a movement we now call DevOps…”
Gene goes on to say that developers and operations people who aren’t at each others’ throats can work together in a way that creates a very fast flow of work through the organization. In an always-on world that is rapidly globalizing and innovating, enabling the business is more important than ever before. There’s simply no time to waste on cycles of infighting and obstruction. Change needs to happen as often as it needs to and that requires an infrastructure of people, technology and processes that allow that to happen.
Companies need to have agility and flexibility in their operations. This is the essence of the TIBCO Two-Second Advantage where IT is tightly linked into the value chain of the organization. Organizations with IT integrated into the value chain are better able to react to changes in market dynamics in real time when it matters.
To learn more, you can check out our On-Demand content featuring the Google+ Hangout titled, “Private PaaS: Accelerating Continuous Delivery for DevOps.”
For more on cloud and systems integration, watch this webinar with Forrester VP and Principal Analyst John Rymer.
