Cloud, DevOps, Agile, Waterfall, Lean, Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, process, process and more processes. What in the world is going on in IT today?
During my 27 years in IT, I’ve realized a lot of things about how IT works or, sometimes, doesn’t work. One is every time we see we can deliver fast enough for business, we create another process to speed up the process to deliver. Yes, I said that right, we create a new process to speed up the process. And this is what I know: creating a process to speed up a process does nothing but slow down getting the work done and the work needs to get done.
It seems we have more processes today than we have processors. But cloud came along and did away with certain processes. Yes, I said that correctly.
Cloud did away with provisioning and deploying hardware. Now we just create virtual instances of what we need either in a private or public cloud and – voila! – we have a server up and running.
But then IT started having problems keeping costs under control and business wanted to increase the speed of getting new products to customers, so DevOps came along. DevOps not only gets more work done faster, it also raises the quality of the work being done. You might wonder how can that be.
Well, you can raise the quality of any process if you automate it and make it extremely reliable by continuously improving it. That is exactly what DevOps does; it automates and continuously improves the quality of processes.
Have I lost you yet? If I have, just hang in there and I promise to package it all up into a nice automated build and deliver my point.
To me, building DevOps in the cloud eliminates a lot of major, major process issues. Look at the diagram above and let me explain how it all really works.
By using and implementing DevOps in the cloud, you can provision your DevOps pipeline in the cloud to hyper-accelerate the deployment of your DevOps infrastructure. As you do this, you will learn about deploying infrastructure in the cloud, which helps you automate deployment of your infrastructure. It will also help you to automate the installation and configuration of the tools you use in your DevOps pipeline. By doing this you will learn to automate the deployment of application and their configuration.
If you go back and read these last few sentences again you will see my packaged-up point. After your organization has built its DevOps pipeline in the cloud, it will know how to deploy infrastructure and applications in the cloud by using the tools it uses to automate and deploy infrastructure and applications. The tools and processes you use to bring new products and services to market incredibly fast and make business smile will be the same tools you will us to build your DevOps pipeline infrastructure.
Think about it. Deploy DevOps in the cloud, leverage the cloud’s speed and scalability. And then automate the deployment of your DevOps environment to the cloud. Then take that knowledge and use it over and over again to deploy your IT services and eliminate the majority of the processes I mentioned earlier.
We at LRS are doing just that today. And I can tell you it has made our adoption of DevOps and the cloud extremely beneficial. We are able to do things so much faster and more reliably than we ever could. No more IT process roadblocks.
About the author
Charles Wilson is our Cloud Solutions Advisor. He has extensive experience in designing and implementing cloud solutions for companies in such industries as financial services, real estate, manufacturing, and retail. He holds certifications as an IBM Certified Enterprise Architect, AWS Technical Professional, and AWS TCO and Cloud Economics.