We recently hosted a thought-provoking discussion about continuous delivery for DevOps with author Gene Kim; Senior Director of Engineering, John Skovron; and Tooling Chief Architect with HP, Steven Witkop.
Companies need this kind of collaboration and coming together in their IT departments so development and operations teams can make processes more efficient. Everyone thinks they have the answers, but it takes balance and listening to different viewpoints to make DevOps a great solution that will add value to an organization.
Ops is a Constraint
When it comes to starting an IT project, there can be some large roadblocks to development and constraints to the value stream. People often think any improvement not made at the constraint is an illusion — not an actual solution to the problem. If a company fixes something before the constraint, they only create more work piled up before the actual constraint. If something is fixed after the constraint, the company will be starved for work.
Despite the misconceptions, according to Gene Kim, what actually impedes flow is operations. Often times, organizations have to wait months for test environments and because of distractions and delays, people test on year-old environments. This completely goes against the initial reasons for testing. The most powerful capability of DevOps is having the ability to enable environment testing when someone needs it. After that, it becomes easy to go into development, but making environments available when they are needed is essential to overcome constraints.
There’s a Need for PaaS
There are many problems a company might face, but when it comes to IT, organizations need to move in a better direction. As John Skovron stated, if deployment time is longer than deployment, if operations bottleneck, or if a company is restrained by manual processes, then they need to consider Platform as a Service (PaaS). Getting pressure from people high up in the organization means people should start reevaluating processes and methods. Sometimes it takes a little outside pressure for people to take action, but that also means overcoming roadblocks. Whoever or whatever is in the way of progress, it needs to be identified. If development, operations, or both are in the way, then having PaaS as an option enables companies to make needed changes.
If you missed the Google+ Hangout, but would still like to hear part of the conversation, you can hear it here.
For more information, you can check out our On-Demand content featuring the Google+ Hangout titled, “Private PaaS: Accelerating Continuous Delivery for DevOps.”
