Charles Darwin would have admired IT evolution. When some lines of business couldn’t get their needs met fast enough by IT and on-premise software, SaaS (software as a service) evolved and was quickly adopted. Corporate IT had to evolve to survive, and it did. Some IT organizations started to embrace the cloud and integrate SaaS with on premise systems. The cloud evolved even more and APIs appeared. Then what happened? IT had to evolve again, and some started to deliver APIs as fast as the business could think up new demands. Enter the new world of continuous delivery with self service, DevOps, and private and public cloud infrastructure.
Now, if you aren’t experiencing this evolution and you have read Darwin, you may be asking how to become and survive as one of the fittest IT organizations. How do you adapt to the new world of the cloud? If you’ve built a digital business foundation, then you’ve probably already evolved and know how to rapidly integrate and manage APIs. That’s because agility is built into some ESB and API management technology, as is elastic scaling. But delivering new APIs is a different story. Your infrastructure needs to support microservices so that developers can just focus on quickly developing small components of business logic and ignore everything else, including the infrastructure, protocols, security, and other API policies. It needs to support DevOps because you can’t wait for long testing cycles to finish. And it needs to just scale, not only because you want to save money, but because you can’t even wait for the time it takes for new hardware to go through purchasing, get deployed, configured, or updated by different teams.
Luckily, or perhaps by natural selection, private and public platforms as a service (PaaS) have evolved to deliver all of these capabilities. Some PaaS have ESB and service creation engines, such as TIBCO BusinessWorks, running natively within the PaaS. Some of the most agile IT organizations have figured out how to deliver continuously in a hybrid world, across the old on-premise systems and the new SaaS, public PaaS, and enterprise PaaS. All of this has enabled IT to deliver new capabilities or changes in weeks, not months.
Don’t become extinct. Learn how the early adopters do DevOps and continuous delivery, and what your best options are. Sign up for our Destination Digital Roundtable panel, “Going to Cloud? Here’s What You’ll Change and Why” with industry experts from Forrester, Cloud Foundry, and Pivotal.
