Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 11 | Page 24

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 www.intelligentcio.com