Get to a State of Continuous Integration and Development

I’ve kept my head in the cloud for as long as I’ve been in the technology space. Today, that space is quickly being filled with ever more applications, new data requirements, and evolving business strategies. I’m seeing companies integrate more systems, leverage powerful APIs, work with new software development kits, and develop powerful customized applications and services to support a quickly transforming market and business landscape.

But what happens when you start to lose control? What happens when there’s too much data to handle? What do you do when there’s just too much code to control and code creep becomes a serious problem? What happens when your release cycle is random at best and has stopped following a good flow? What happens when innovation is stifled?

These are the growing pains of a digital transformation.

Consider this, Gartner recently stated that IT will be increasingly tasked with supporting complex, distributed applications using new technologies that are spread across systems in multiple locations, including on-premises data centers, the public cloud and hosting providers. This means you’ll need to adopt a better model to handle complex systems, services, data points, and applications. DevOps is a great strategy to get you there.

In my last post, I outlined DevOps 101 and how to adopt a culture of continuous innovation. In that blog, I discussed how DevOps isn’t just two words combined together. Rather, it’s all of the following:

This means that adopting a "state of DevOps" isn’t just one platform environment. It’s an ongoing shift in the way that your entire organization thinks and behaves. Oftentimes, this isn’t something you can do alone. Working with a good partner can help you shift the way you think and operate around services, applications, users, access, data, and so much more. The good news is that once the DevOps process is started and is moving along, you begin to reap the benefits of continuous innovation. It’s like a business engine leveraging the most advanced services and application development structures.

A good DevOps practice allows an organization to have structured release cycles, often several times a week to ensure optimal performance and user experience. And, in a good model, these releases are transparent to the user. They simply see the benefit of innovation. Again, this doesn’t just have to be applications.

Let me give you a specific example. We were working with a global customer that was running an on-premise big data solution with HDFS. They did the storage and all processing onsite, until, it got really complicated. So, we helped them migrate the entire platform to Azure PaaS and leveraged the power of a data lake, as well as Azure data analytics to simplify the architecture while gaining the biggest benefits.

However, to get there, you’ll need to go on a journey exploring your own development process and, very importantly, your business. That said, in getting to a state of continuous integration, development, and innovation, here are a few tips and best practices to keep in mind:

As you look at those four points, it’s important to note that DevOps isn’t just an upgrade to your coding and development process. DevOps has the capacity to impact almost every part of your business. If you’re at a point where managing applications, services, and data is a challenge, maybe it’s time to really look at DevOps and adopt a powerful cultural shift that can become your engine around digital transformation.

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