When DevOps tiptoes inside IT, what’s the best foot forward?

SINGAPORE: People can be left-handed or right-handed (and err, sometimes, red-handed) but generally they are not left-footed or right-footed in that sense.

If that’s how it works, Dev and Ops in IT anatomy are moving along together in a sure-footed way too. At least, from how it appears with the term DevOps gaining firm ground in many conversations and keynotes around the industry. But then, can one foot limp without the other moving in Tango? If not, what was happening so far? Which foot is better or indispensable if it ever comes down to that?

While we try to work out this fascinating Foxtrot, Andi Mann, VP of Strategic Solutions, Office of the CTO, CA Technologies, is thinking and answering questions beyond the current walkathons. An author himself (covering many interstitial IT issues in 'The Innovative CIO'), and enviably passionate and adept on the subject, Mann deftly treads through the newly piled IT snow of DevOps and leaves some interesting trails.

Follow on.

Let’s talk about the ‘shoe-bites’ first. Your keynote at CA APJ Analyst and Media Summit said a lot. Agreed. DevOps is the latest wearable trend. So is Agile and automation in the ‘Dev’ space. Any chance of it affecting IT teams in an ironical way?

If you are hinting about the flipside, yes there are some areas of concern. There are enough jobs to be around. Plus, businesses today are about new processes, new markets and services. None of the customers we talk to mention anything about cost-cuts. They are instead, looking for growth in the right way. They want to get ready for new markets and new products. At least for now, customers are not worrying about cutting but growing. Concerns that generally surround automation trends remain in the air but I do not see them affecting customers at all presently.

Over the next 12 months, pretty much every enterprise would need a DevOps approach and so there would be a talent war of sorts and companies are gearing up for the new scenarios as well as training and re-skilling.

DevOps has been soon followed by a coterie of terms – CloudOps, NoOps, WebOps and then there is the new wind of Dockers circling the developer landscape. Which ones are you on your radar and why?

No matter what genre of ‘Op’ it is, it boils down to service availability and performance. That’s why we are excited about the SaaS model. These are on our or the customer’s radar so eventually they come in ours too. These are new ways for ‘Ops’ and there are some fundamental things that ‘Ops’ do so the discipline still applies. Slow applications, errors or downtime are out of question in any case. We are adapting to the market in that it is automating, redefining scripting or configuration. We are also looking at start-ups and any new technology choice or change that is happening around. Yes, we are looking at all emerging patterns all the time and what we have realized is that most companies do things in small pockets.

What then, is the equation between NoOps and DevOps like?

NoOps, in my opinion, does not actually exist unless it is a utopian world.

Why?

You would always no-matter-what - need Ops. You may not call it that, but it would stay. We are fine if someone calls it something else, but we don’t accept the idea that the discipline per se, would go away. There are areas that developers need and learn deeply and work on specializations therein, but the horizontal and vertical sides of the space co-exist. A lot of people think of DevOps as developers taking over everything but it is also about Operations-people providing the right tools before tests.

What if we start thinking of NoDev then? Would that ever be a possibility?

Yes, if you are using 5-generation languages and advanced APIs. Today’s and future programming languages are disrupting a lot of things and taking everything to a new usability, consumerised level. I would still maintain that NoDev is just like NoOps, in that, neither of them is too likely.

Developers seem to be suddenly back in the spotlight – whether it is DevOps or community action or collaborative projects of high-key levels or talent fights. What’s your view of the ecosystem?

It is a hard change but a good change and surely demand for good engineers and developers is rising and will go up. We see pay-range increasing for anyone who can reinvent their skills and resume for this new landscape. The enterprise side view is different and there are not enough developers out there. So developers need to gain experience and work in collaborative approaches as these are the new demand areas for enterprises in terms of anticipated skills.

How is DevOps turning out for CA on the inside?

Our strategy is to let people rise up to what this DevOps trend really is. It is an amalgam of people, process and technology and yet no one is in a position to provide the technology side adequately. That’s what we are trying to do. We have been doing Ops for over 30 years now and that’s where our DNA gets an edge. We have things that developers need whether it is the range of tools or capabilities. We also have people who understand DevOps deeply. We have adjacent technologies over and above that – example –security or organizational change abilities to act as the right catalysts. DevOps is relatively error-free and can offer production-scale test environments because the process is agile, continuous and iterative.

Today, applications are turning into competitive advantages and that’s why our stack is fresh when it comes to continuous delivery, agile operations or parallel development etc. We have new offerings on Mobile API Gateway, API Developer Portal, SaaS API Developer Portal etc. These go deep into providing simplified access for mobile users across all applications; into creating, testing and publishing APIs with new revenue planning and monetization strengths. They can publish APIs from a range of data sources through SaaS platform. We are very excited and very ready for this new application-economy – if I were to cut it short.

Does DevOps intersect anywhere with Cloud projects and community initiatives like OpenStack or Hadoop?

It can rely on cloud computing for better outcomes. It does not necessarily need cloud but it can work so much better on cloud. OpenStack gives developers the ability for rapid provisioning or re-provisioning, for example and hence these technologies can enable DevOps better, even if it can happen without them.