COMMENT
I
t’s really not surprising that
this misperception exists. A
traditional IT organisation
glances at a company like Netflix
and they may see a unique entity, a
“unicorn,” wholly unlike themselves.
They’re not even entirely wrong.
More extreme implementations of
approaches such as microservices or
near-continuous production releases
likely won’t become the universal
norm—especially in the “classic IT”
(aka Mode 1, to use the terminology
of research firm Gartner) parts of
their infrastructure. However, that
doesn’t mean DevOps principles can’t
also benefit the conservative IT of
conservative firms.
It’s about the software
The first reason that DevOps practices
apply outside of greenfield, cloudnative (aka Gartner’s Mode 2) IT is
that the rules are changing. Venture
capitalist Marc Andreesen’s “software
is eating the world” meme has become
something of a cliche but it’s no less
true for that. As my Red Hat colleague
James Labocki wrote recently, “Bank
24
INTELLIGENTCIO
of America is not just a bank, they are
a transaction processing company.
Exxon Mobil, is not only an oil and gas
company, they are a GIS company.
With each passing day Walgreens
business is more reliant on electronic
health records.”
Furthermore, these shifts in technology
and how business is transacted are
creating new competitors that come
at established firms from non-obvious
directions and places. Barriers created
by capital requirements, transaction
costs, or even just brand become
less relevant when a mobile app can
change the landscape in a relative
blink of an eye. (Think of all the new
next-day or same-day approaches
to delivery being trialed that could
emerge as competition to the logistics
incumbents.)
DEVOPS AS WE USUALLY
TALK ABOUT IT TODAY
IS INDEED RATHER
NEW. IT’S THE CHILD
OF PERVASIVE OPEN
SOURCE, CONTINUOUS
INTEGRATION
TECHNOLOGIES,
PLATFORM-AS-ASERVICE (PAAS),
SOFTWARE-DEFINED
INFRASTRUCTURES,
AND A HOST OF OTHER
RELATIVELY MODERN
TECHNOLOGIES–WHICH
TAKEN AS A WHOLE ARE
QUITE RECENT
Therefore, while the priorities for
classic IT may be different from
those of cloud-native, business-asusual needs to evolve. Even calling
traditional IT “legacy” is a dangerous
and misleading turn of phrase as it
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