DevOps methodologies have helped organizations enhance security and agility. Now we’re on the cusp of another exciting transformation—this time in the way IT organizations handle modern workloads from the edge to the cloud.
Consider the changes that were ushered in by DevOps. Rather than a fragmented development approach that featured separate teams working in distinct areas, DevOps promote collaboration and integration. At the same time, it eliminates the need to separate tasks like testing and infrastructure provisioning, each of which got provisioned into automated workflows.
With DevOps:
- Teams gain a better understanding of the needs of other departments.
- A single delivery pipeline streamlines what is often a disconnected, often unwieldy process.
- Companies become more agile and can develop better, more secure digital products.
This worked well, as long as applications didn’t need to meet “real-time, always on” demands.
“Always On” and the Cloud
As more organizations have moved toward an always-on business model to provide anywhere anytime access, they have also shifted to the cloud to gain greater agility. Response times have had to be faster, and there is little room for error or iterations in the interactions between development and operations.
To a large degree, the divide between development and operations teams still exists today, and “move to cloud” has accelerated the need to address this challenge. Cloud workloads are constantly being run, developed, deployed, and updated. The always-on nature of the cloud requires an integrated always-on approach between application engineering and operations. In the context of the cloud, we’re reaching the point where we shouldn’t to treating engineering and operations as separate activities but rather as a well-oiled coordinated process.
Engineering-Led Ops – On the Cusp of Something Big
Wouldn’t it be better to just automate the more mundane tasks, plug them into your pipeline, and allow engineers to automatically look at what's happening in production to fix any problems? Imagine code that can fix itself with the right actions as soon as a problem is detected, with no support tickets and no alerts needed.
Engineering-led operations is about bringing people, infrastructure, applications, and data closer together to make key processes almost touchless. Not only does it enhance operational agility, it also speaks to the integration between these two functions. All this is part of a broader trend toward function integration, where modern software engineering becomes less about building products and services and more about building modern businesses.
Learn more about engineering-led operations in this blog by Premkumar Balasubramanian, SVP and CTO, Digital Solutions, Hitachi Vantara.
Learn more about Hitachi’s new Application Reliability Center in Dallas, a physical cloud and engineering center of excellence that helps solution providers and customers modernize their IT operations with an agile, engineering-led approach.