Over the last ten years, we have seen a shift towards automation in how applications have been released. Automation has been encouraged first by agile’s embrace of continuous integration and delivery, and now the broader move to DevOps. As deployment automation left the sphere of the individual development team, another trend has emerged. The understanding of what it means to deploy an application in an automated fashion has steadily expanded. For developers in the early days of continuous delivery, production concerns were usually secondary. They would take a single build, and automate its deployment to test environments. Some teams would succeed in expanding this approach to production with a full-fledged delivery pipeline, but most would stumble. Ignoring production concerns in the lower environments resulted in their work being dismissed as unworkable in production environments. However, the success of agile development meant an increased demand for change in production. At the same time, the trend towards cloud services expanded the number of targets that a given deployment would impact. Production support teams had to automate, and in a way that would also work for the rapid rate of change in development and test. The build pipeline model was close, but didn’t meet the Ops needs of incremental change (rather than full builds), and orchestrating changes across multiple builds and tiers.
A 2012 survey of over 500 technologists by UrbanCode found that only 12% of teams scoped production releases to a single build. With the business demanding faster change, and DevOps ascending, we have seen automation mature in the production environments rapidly in the past several years. This includes the rise of Application Deployment/Release Automation as a tool category at the start of this decade. These ADA tools are defined by automation scoped at a business application – they coordinate across multiple tiers and components. So they deploy not just the new version of a web service, but also five other web services the backend databases, etc. With DevOps better linking development and operations, and an increased willingness to automate in production, we saw the first big shift in the scope of automation. From deploying a build, to deploying the build and related builds, content and database changes. The web app was still the most common scenario. Today we are seeing the next major expansion underway, and it’s hitting on several fronts at once.
- The first front is that organizations whose releases span multiple business applications are adding release centric orchestration to speed releases of coupled applications.
- The next front is a move beyond the web application itself. Mobile development tied to backend services is getting pulled in to the definition of the “business application” as are systems of record including the mainframe.
- The third front is a shift down the stack. The environment and infrastructure are seen increasingly not as a place the application runs, but as part of the application itself. As that shift happens, we see a push to make a change to the CPU count in a VM go through the same types of automation and governance that updates to the behavior of a web service go through. Change is change.
- Finally, we are seeing the normalization of Platform as a Service offering like Bluemix. That results in increased acceptance of the technology, but also the desire to coordinate change to services delivered through a PaaS platform and those delivered through other cloud or traditional data-center platforms.
Broadly, IT is delivering value to the business by delivering services. Changes to those services tend to be scoped to applications that are complex. The trend is to treat everything in that application that is software defined the same through the same channels. That lets system level testing validate the whole system, and for the whole system to be promoted forward together. The above discussion not only informs about the change taking place but also prompts at taking the step towards the change. The move to DevOps is bringing about change rapidly. On November 20, some of the industry experts and leaders got together to discuss the effects and steps to adopt the change effectively, at the IBM DevOps Symposium in the New York area (Jersey City). Understand how to adopt DevOps successfully by listening to distinguished industry leaders and experts. Join us for the replay of the webcast. Be a part of the change
About the Author:
Eric Minick is a Technical Evangelist. He joined IBM through its acquisition of UrbanCode. He has spent the last ten years helping organizations – large and small – adopt continuous integration, delivery and now –DevOps. He is a frequent speaker on the topic, and co-authored Application Release and Deployment For Dummies. Prior to consulting, Eric was a developer, test automation engineer and support engineer, and has contributed to multiple generations of UrbanCode products.
