DevOps in a Bi-Modal World (Part 3 of 4)

In Part 2 of this series, we discussed what IT needs to do in a Mode 1 world to make itself more relevant to the business and reduce complexity. In this part, we will turn our attention to Mode 2 and discuss how the organization can solve its challenges by improving agility and increasing scalability.

Mode 2: Improving Agility by Modernizing Development and Operations

With resources now free from handling each and every inbound request for an environment and being confident that those environments are running efficiently and securely on the right providers, operations teams can begin to work with development teams to design new processes for their cloud native applications.

These newly designed processes and cross-functional team structure combined with a platforms that supports running the broadest amount of languages and frameworks within microservices based architectures can enable the development and operations teams to achieve higher release frequencies. By utilizing microservices and standardized platforms and configurations these new applications will allow for independent release and scaling of components of the application.

This can result in an increased success rate of change, faster cycle time, and the ability to scale specific services independently, making the life of both development and operations teams easier and allowing them to meet the needs of the line of business. We have experience doing this with very large software development organizations [1].

Mode 2: Scalability with Programmable Infrastructure

As agility of development and operations processes is improved and release frequency increased, so to does the demand for more scalable infrastructure to run those releases on. Operations teams face the challenge of delivering infrastructure that will scale to meet the demand of this ever-growing number of applications. The last thing the head of operations would like to have to explain to the management team of a company is why an extremely successful new application was hitting a wall as to the maximum number of users it could support. This simply can’t happen. Unfortunately, the current infrastructure is not scalable, neither from a financial nor technical standpoint.

One option might be to build out a scale-out infrastructure, perhaps based on OpenStack, the leading open source project for infrastructure-as-a-service. However, the operations team doesn’t want to spend it’s time taking open source code and making it consumable and sustainable for the enterprise. It doesn’t have the resources to test and certify that OpenStack will work with each new piece of hardware it brings in. It also can’t afford to maintain the code base for long periods of time with the resources available. Finally, OpenStack is missing key features that operations needs and they don’t want to develop those in house as well.

What operations really needs is a way to minimize cost and increase scale through the use of commodity hardware and a massively scalable distributed architecture coupled with the enterprise management features required to operate that infrastructure and a stable, tested, certified way of consuming the open source projects that make up that infrastructure. By having this, operations can deploy scale-out infrastructure in multiple locations and still aggregate management functions like chargeback, utilization, governance, and workflows into a single logical location. Many of our customers have found this solution beneficial in reducing cost and ensuring stability at scale [2].

Coming Next in Part 4: Red Hat Cloud Suite for a bi-modal world.

Interested in discussing more with us? Be sure to visit us at the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo, October 27-30, booth P7 to meet James and the OpenStack team from Red Hat.

References
[1] www.openshift.com/customers
[2] http://www.redhat.com/en/resources/morphlabs-reinvents-cloud-services-enterprise-ready-iaas-solution