DevOps

Application deployment is the most critical phase in the software development lifecycle.  A decade ago, deployment was infrequent and a mostly manual and complex endeavor, scheduled at most monthly, quarterly, or even annually.  Given the scale of change involved, software upgrades created contention between development and operations teams. Deployment was perceived as high-risk with predictable downtime for users.

DevOps emerged in response to these issues and since its appearance in 2009 has seen a wildfire adoption rate (*). It is a fundamental culture shift that is taking hold on most development platforms in all industry sectors and is by no means confined to “born on the Web” companies….

Today’s digital transformation requires the time-to-market speeds that only DevOps can deliver.

DevOps helps businesses respond rapidly to market changes, by delivering higher-quality software updates to users more quickly. It relies on continuous delivery and continuous test to reduce risk and obtain feedback fast and often.

Instead of managing huge transformations with a major user impact, DevOps produces a steady stream of smaller incremental changes that are more reliable, with less overall impact and more readily accepted by users.

DevOps is an organizational change that depends on automated, tool-based collaboration between all actors in a software project: from developers, to testers, operations and end-users.

The IBM i platform runs mission critical/core business applications, usually stable, with slow moving development cycles.  Some applications are even considered too critical (or too old) to change. Add to that the historically risk-adverse IBM i culture of traditional IT methods and you may not expect an ideal breeding ground for DevOps.  But you would be wrong.  DevOps methods are taking hold in IBM i environments and the pull is coming directly from the business owners.  Bimodal IT implementations share the same tooling across platforms and languages to ensure back-end and front-end development stay in sync.

“Since adopting DevOps, Nationwide Insurance have witnessed a 80% reduction in critical defects, 70% increase in system availability, and 90% on-time delivery vs. 60% previously.”