South African businesses are starting to move towards DevOps, but many still have questions around DevOps methodologies and measuring DevOps success, says Patrick Hyland, co-founder and director at the OpsWorks Group, a London-based DevOps practice consultancy.
Hyland is set to travel to South Africa early next year to participate in the CA IT Management Symposium Africa 2016, where he will elaborate on patterns for setting up DevOps practicing teams, change management and ways to measure success.
Hyland, who is in partnership with local partner Galeboe, says South African companies moving to DevOps tend to focus on the agility component. Many others, like their counterparts abroad, still have an ambiguous understanding of what DevOps is, he says.
"A good way to describe it is developers collaborating with operations to move a product down a value stream using principles derived from lean manufacturing", he says. "Much like a car is manufactured on an assembly line and runs through a series of validation tests, so that if it was sprayed the wrong colour, for example, the assembly line would stop immediately and the problem would be addressed."
However, in the world of IT, not all stakeholders are in favour of new approaches.
"Using Gartner's 'bimodal IT' as a reference model, some areas of IT might be seen as more conservative and focus on systems of record, where there can be resistance to new application engineering approaches, while others such as DevOps practicing teams are more experimental and agile. DevOps focuses on getting product to market fast and effectively, but might be seen by some as 'testosterone-fuelled adolescents', keen to innovate but tolerant of some brief failures in achieving this," Hyland says.
Effective DevOps practice bridges the gaps between these worldviews by attempting to manage change in a safe, reliable and highly collaborative way at a brisk pace while observing and integrating with existing service management practices such as ITIL.
Hyland will outline his experience of good DevOps practice and metrics of DevOps success at CA IT Management Symposium 2016 on 25 February at Vodacom World, Midrand, where CA's DevOps application delivery solutions will also be showcased.
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