IT has become a strategic partner in enabling the business of every enterprise. IT operations span across diverse aspects of an enterprise -- ranging from infrastructure, applications, and cloud to service management and many more.
One of the key components of IT operations is app delivery: the bulk of the business today relies on a swift, flexible, and error-free app delivery for the success and growth of the business. Super-charged application development and delivery directly translates to faster time-to-market for products and services and, in turn, greater revenue-generating opportunities. Application architecture and its related ecosystem have transformed in the last few years.
Today’s modern enterprise is looking at a whole new dimension to the way applications are built, provisioned, tested, and ultimately deployed to end-users. Business demands faster, flexible, cost-effective, scalable, and quickly rectifiable approaches to application availability.
This new dimension calls for streamlining IT operations for application delivery in order to achieve the following:
Moreover, these need to be accomplished with unprecedented speed and agility to support newer business models and revenue channels. Consider this: 27,000 technical professionals were surveyed in the 2017 State of DevOps Report by Puppet. It was found that high-performing teams deploy code multiple times to production in a day. They have lead times of less than 1 hour to deploy changes into production and mean times of less than 1 hour to recover. Also, they have change failure rates of 10-15% on average. We are talking about some serious organizational performance when it comes to application delivery.
Traditionally, most platforms and processes within enterprise IT operations have relied on command-line scripts, specialized tools, and a closed set of skilled personnel to perform application delivery. This approach does not suit well to address complex modern enterprise needs as described in Table 1. It would simply be not scalable.
New-generation application architecture revolves around microservices and the need for on-demand delivery of these services to production. This calls for a relook at platforms that can iron out the complexity of dealing with continuous delivery, ensuring scale and velocity while providing full visibility and faster recovery. The ability to provide self-service, the democratization of DevOps, and standardized best practices go a long way to meet the needs of the modern software-driven enterprise.
Containers are key for next-generation app delivery DevOps. Businesses will, of course, benefit from using containers as they provide infra optimization. However, it doesn’t mean much unless the business can also benefit from the application’s time-to-market. Next Generation app delivery platforms will need to focus on Enterprise's ability to reduce the application’s time-to-market while still enabling the capabilities listed in Table 1.
The best way for enterprises looking to modernize DevOps is to focus on IT operations, keeping the application context in mind -- as opposed to focusing on the nitty-gritty of the underlying IT infrastructure. To put it in simple terms, simplify the App delivery operations of IT by providing the right level of abstraction required to ease adoption and scale operations.
IT operations can now truly become automated, self-servicing, standardized, and minimally disruptive for enterprises looking to embrace container-based app delivery. WaveMaker HyScale is a next-generation app delivery platform that allows development teams to stay focused on the app and become self-servicing at the same time. This allows DevOps to set up best practices around application delivery.
