The New Dev Ops Paradigm

The Application-Centric Cloud development model becomes a development/operations (dev ops) approach to manage applications. A major cultural shift within traditional IT in it brings together two groups: developers and operations. Traditional cultural differences between these groups are very pronounced in the current information technology environments. This area mainly brings forth a blended approach to moving applications and a much quicker and agile approach to the application-centric cloud. It also makes both sides responsible for the success of the application rather than a divide that developers code and operations that the applications. It's not only true for an application cloud, but the third platform as IDC calls the new environment, or the bifurcated platform that Gartner calls it. The reason for the new model is that one cannot wait for the cycle times that were created by the old model to facilitate the service level agreements that most companies need to be competitive.

In the new model, developers can develop the code or application and can deploy them in production without having another group involved in the process. So that's why the term developer operations evolved. The applications deployed can be extremely quickly and updated because there is no need other than quality standards that are higher than the standards in the postmodern dev ops environment. Operations take on a whole new role in this environment and ensuring quality and administering the system so that the applications deployed are seamless and productive. Change management still resides with operations, but the operations group must work very closely with the developers as they move their code to production. They also have to be totally cognizant of the impact of changes and ensure that the developers are testing in a dev ops environment well enough to ensure success. The dependencies of the composable application resolved during the development, and it saves operations from solving the problems when an application moves to development operations..

That is why the concept of the platform like OpenShift or Cloud Foundry becomes critical in the framework that is put in for dev ops to be consistent with all the new languages, databases and tools. Since not everything is going to move to an application-centric cloud immediately, the operations group and developers have to continue in the current structure with the application-centric cloud being an overlay to the current environment. Clearly this will save the operations group a significant amount of time but again you need to have a bifurcation of the group so that development operations can flourish.

In both environments, it is critical to maintaining a problem management in critical situation group that deals with issues of availability and applications SLA's. Problem Management will never go away in any model even though the articles promise Nirvana from this model is evolutionary to get there not revolutionary.

This model enabled facile deployment and shared responsibility, not responsibility for one group over the other but a blended group that's responsibility. It moves the company to a more competitive advantage by using and a development operations environment. In working with some of the financial corporations, clearly the cultural divide is the key that the executives have to deal with this issue. The lines
drawn a long time ago that the blending of the groups required reassignment of people into each group to learn what the other group had to do.

Also, while doing agile development a multidiscipline team of operations, developers, analysts and business people take this to a whole new level. Lately, I have seen that many companies talk about agile and force it into a model that fits the old IT. These most companies believe will sustain them into the future.

In the new environment, I have seen products like Cloud Forms and Puppet and Chef all open source tools used to manage the environment. As a previously stated the tools are not the issue but the mindset needs to develop to a share all environment where the success comes from rapid application development and deployment. With this, it enables system administrators and developers move to a new level of application deployment. Each group will bring its strengths and weaknesses into the new infrastructure, and this will enable the world of application centricity to become a reality.