In fact, operations becomes a part of a more agile and adaptable application landscape that can be run in the cloud. To speed up development, methodologies exist like Agile with Scrum to follow-up the process or Kanban to work in short cycles.
The impact on operations is a never-ending number of releases that need to be tested, released, deployed, operated, and monitored. This, most of the time in a cloud environment. So, the challenge is twofold, not only the agile way of working, but also the adaptation of new cloud technologies.
Therefore, ICT operations must also transform to support this agile way of working in a new environment. Otherwise, you will end-up spending your precious development resources on Operations tasks.
There is only one way to do this, and this is by automating (as much as possible or needed) the operations tasks. In addition to the automation, Operations must also adopt this new way of working, hence, an Ops Transformation is required to help the team embrace these new technologies in an ever-changing context.
Automation is one thing, but what and how? When we think about automation, we think of tools to help us in this process. As with classical operations, we let us be guided by the tools we know and several integrations that shape those tools to our environment. Also, as with classical operations, it all starts with the infrastructure on which the applications run.
However, and here is the difference, in classical operations, all computing power was owned by you, whereas in this new environment, computing power, resources, APIs and others can be distributed over multiple providers in the cloud. The cloud is also a computing platform, but with different interfaces, other ways of working and a totally different pricing model. The price is based on your consumption, which is positive, but brings with it the management of your consumption in the cloud. Operations and Infrastructure Managers must be aware of the consumption of their resources in the cloud and the way this must be managed.
A second difference is the choice of tools by developers rather than the operations team itself … So, operations need to adapt to new technologies and ways of working, driven by development. This is certainly why the role DevOps has been created, as Ops is driven by Dev. In addition to DevOps, it is the task of Operations and Infrastructure Managers to embrace the changes and to bring new ways of working to operations.
CHALLENGES OF OPS TRANSFORMATION
Digital Transformation is thus not only about the business, but translates into numerous other domains within an organization, including ICT Operations. This brings with it new challenges for operations which we call Ops Transformation. The challenges of Ops Transformation are:
- Cloud brings with it new types of resources that must be managed as your own infrastructure
- Deploys are part of a continuous integration/continuous deployment pipeline, so deploys are automated against a dynamic infrastructure
- Observability is the instrumentation of your application to deliver insight in the performance and behavior of your application. This is mainly a development aspect that needs to translate into operations
- Protect your cloud assets against malicious behavior
- Control the cost of your cloud resources
- AIOps combines big data and machine learning to automate IT operations processes, including event correlation, anomaly detection and causality determination.
These challenges are all new to classical operations and need to be addressed by the operations team in cooperation with DevOps. Operations and Infrastructure Managers need to make sure that these challenges are extended to integrating the tools in a good functioning operations environment. The challenges both point in the direction of the organization and the adaptation of the organization to these changes and to the new set of tools that must be integrated in a seamlessly working environment.
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION TOOLS TO MANAGE YOUR DIGITAL LANDSCAPE
New challenges require new tools and approaches to the problem at hand. On the other hand, operations may not be overwhelmed by different new tools to execute their tasks. So, it will be your task to find a correct balance between existing and new tools and convince Operations of the usefulness of these tools.
These new tools will bring with them new integrations, based on your Digital Transformation landscape. From a development point of view, new tools might seem the way to go, but from an operations perspective this is not always the case. So, if you introduce too many new tools and ways of working, you will end up with Development (or DevOps) doing your operations.
Read more in our next article on “Why DevOps is not PlatformOps”.
