Modernize apps improve developer experiences with Red Hat Services

The practice of designing, building, and maintaining the foundational technology and infrastructure that support software applications and services is changing.

For more than a decade, DevOps has emphasized the close collaboration between development and operations teams, breaking down divisions and promoting continuous integration and delivery. Agile, on the other hand, prioritizes iterative development, customer feedback, and adaptability.

While these methodologies have both been transformative, the IT landscape is witnessing an evolution. Organizations are focused on business outcomes, and recognize that to achieve their goals they need to take a product-oriented approach that shifts ownership of delivering that product from a single team to a much broader group.

A component of this change is the shift left, which refers to the practice of moving activities and responsibilities that are traditionally performed later in the development process to an earlier stage, where better decisions can be made and unnecessary hand-offs between teams eliminated.

The goal of shifting left is to identify and address issues, defects, security risks, and potential problems as early as possible in the software development life cycle, rather than waiting until they become more costly and time-consuming to fix in later stages. A prevalent drawback to this approach is the increased cognitive load on developers, adding frontend, backend, build and deployment code, infrastructure, integrations, and security to their focus on writing application code. Another challenge of this approach is finding a way to apply lean principles across the enterprise and reduce the number of changeovers and handoffs between teams in order to deliver the solutions customers demand while not shifting all of the burden onto developers.

The developer workload is increasing

Shifting left has increased the cognitive load on developers. They are tasked with additional responsibility such as software delivery and expectations to become experts across more domains.

This means learning new skills such as, continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery, continuous deployment, and infrastructure as code for containers.

For those organizations struggling to adopt a shift-left approach, an application platform, such as Red Hat OpenShift Cloud Services, can transfer this cognitive load onto the platform and off of the developer.

Respond to complex systems and processes

Addressing friction and toil in the development workflow is crucial for promoting developer efficiency, reducing burnout, and helping teams to deliver high-quality software in a timely manner.

But before we can identify and address these bottlenecks in the organization, it’s important to understand what these terms mean.

Friction is where the flow of value stops because a developer has to wait for someone to approve something or because another process has to pick up what’s being done. If that process has a backlog it creates a bottleneck stalling developer progress, adding frustration and time to the development process.

Toil can be defined as any work or activity that a developer has to do that is not directly related to achieving the business objective. This might include responding to an unplanned outage or other high-priority user ticket, filling out a ServiceNow request for a resource, or stopping to reconfigure something on their developer workstation.

IT organizations can take measures to identify and eliminate sources of friction and toil through continuous improvement processes, adopting a platform engineering approach, along with agile and DevOps methodologies, and investing in tools that streamline development workflows.

However, these challenges cannot be eliminated through tooling alone. It’s essential for organizations to consider how they can alter processes and improve interactions to increase effectiveness. This could include self-service capabilities, well-defined team interaction patterns, and adopting a site reliability engineering (SRE) approach.

Taking measures such as these can help organizations revolutionize the way their teams work.

Organizations know they must deliver innovative customer experiences to stay competitive, but every new application and service release adds cost and complexity.

To gain the flexibility and efficiency needed to excel, many organizations are developing new applications in a public cloud and moving existing workloads there as well.

But, as many IT teams recognize, not all workloads can be moved to the public cloud because of security, data protection, and monolithic legacy systems that cannot be easily ported.

The dynamic nature of hybrid cloud can also create challenges such as:

• An inconsistent experience across clouds.
• A steep learning curve with the hundreds of cloud providers and services available.
• A negative impact on developer productivity and experience.

All of these factors make it challenging to decide which public and private clouds are right for each workload, and what you choose today won’t always be the best solution tomorrow.

Support your cloud journey with a consistent foundation and expert help

When making the move to the public cloud or expanding your organization’s IT environment, it’s important to remember that no single cloud provider or on-premise environment has everything your organization needs.

To make the most of the public cloud today and be prepared for future needs such as pushing deployments out to your network’s edge, it’s important that your application platform doesn’t limit future options.

Red Hat OpenShift is an application platform that empowers your developers across hybrid and multicloud environments with the flexibility, tools, and speed to increase their productivity, streamline the application development process, and support each new application that you release.

To stay competitive and meet customer expectations, many organizations are striving to accelerate how they build, deploy, and run their applications and services.

Moving to a containerized environment can help, and there are plenty of tools and services to get you started. However, not all of them offer the interoperability you need to be agile and responsive to the current marketplace while remaining security-focused and consistent.

Container and Kubernetes solutions that are built for an open, hybrid cloud strategy will give you the flexibility to run applications across IT environments. These types of containerized architectures require expertise to run, and pull time and resources away from application development to manage the IT infrastructure instead.

However, there are many ways to access modern infrastructure, even if your business isn’t set up to run the entire stack by itself. That’s where a provider with a portfolio of managed cloud services, such as Red Hat Cloud Services, can help.

Support in the cloud

By offloading the responsibility for some or all of the management, updating, and maintenance to Red Hat experts, your organization can focus on developing applications while reducing the time and costs associated with running the platform.

In fact, Forrester research found that study participants who used Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Cloud Services reduced the developer time required to plan, document, and design each application by 85%.⁵

Red Hat OpenShift is a unified application platform to build, modernize, and deploy applications at scale. It brings together tested and trusted services to reduce the friction of developing, deploying, running, and managing applications. And it provides a consistent experience across public cloud, on-premise, hybrid cloud, or edge architecture.

Another aspect of the emerging trend toward platform engineering is viewing the developer as the customer. In this approach, the designing and building of toolchains and workflows as an integrated product is done with the developer in mind. The goal of this approach is to provide self-service capabilities with automated infrastructure operators for software engineering organizations.

Platform engineers create, maintain, and continuously evolve the integrated product, or internal developer platform (IDP), to support the needs of software developers by providing common, reusable tools and capabilities.

However, there is a component to platform engineering that is often overlooked, which is the developer experience. From an internal perspective, your developers are your customers, but a common downfall to effectively implementing a platform engineering approach is making assumptions about what your developers need.

It’s important to not focus solely on tooling in platform engineering, and remember to keep the outcomes that the organization is striving for front and center.

Focus on the developer experience

Developer portals help teams curate, manage, and replicate these environments. Red Hat Developer Hub helps to build developer portals with a supported and opinionated framework to streamline the developer process with access to the tools and resources developers need to build high-quality software efficiently.

Building out your developer platform and connecting it to a developer portal, such as Red Hat Developer Hub, can be a daunting task filled with many decision points. Red Hat Consulting, together with Red Hat Training and Certification, can help teams create a streamlined modern DevOps approach. Red Hat Training provides training courses and certifications that help IT teams build skills for new technology and tools. Red Hat Consulting and the Red Hat Developer Hub Pilot are available to help you put that new knowledge into practice.

From planning and deployment to training and certification to support and operational guidance, Red Hat Services can help you build and develop effective, collaborative teams to get the most out of your technology investment.

Working alongside your teams, Red Hat Services provides you with the resources you need to plan, begin, accelerate, and expand your open source journey.

Services for application acceleration

Whether you’re optimizing application delivery, adopting cloud-native development practices, or building intelligent applications, we can help you on your journey.

Red Hat Services consists of consulting, training and certification, and Technical Account Managers (TAMs), and works with your teams to provide hands-on mentoring, helping them build skills more quickly. By embracing Red Hat’s Services, your organization can navigate the complexities of modern application development, adopt agile methodologies, and benefit from the power of open-source innovation.

Working with experts along your application development journey offers:

Here are a few steps you can take on your own to advance your cloud journey today.

Build a tool inventory

Develop a comprehensive list or database of all the hardware and software tools utilized within your organization’s IT infrastructure. This will help identify gaps and opportunities for the future.

Interview your developers

Learning more about your developers’ experience by running MBPM exercises can help identify points of friction, bottlenecks, and foster continuous learning within the team.

Hands-on learning

Explore an extensive collection of curriculum for hands-on training and certification as well as materials such as this Red Hat Cloud Services pilot datasheet.