COMMENT
implies static and in need of wholesale
replacement.
Rather, this “low speed” IT may
prioritise stability over rapid change
but it still needs to increase its
relevance to new organisational
initiatives and reduce complexity.
To increase relevance, it needs to
deliver environments for developers
in minutes instead of days or weeks.
To reduce complexity, it needs to
implement policy-driven automation
that reduces the need for manual (and
error-prone) tasks.
Getting there requires a combination
of policy-based hybrid cloud
management and DevOps approaches.
GORDON HAFF
DevOps thinking is proven to
work in traditional industries
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-a-service (PaaS), softwaredefined infrastructures, and a host of
other relatively modern technologies–
which taken as a whole are quite
recent. However, DevOps as a general
approach has many analogs going
back decades in manufacturing and
other industries.
Consider some of the terminology
associated with DevOps such as
“automation of process” and “culture
of collaboration.” These very much
describe the transformation of the
automobile industry to the modern
age. Concepts such as kaizen (loosely,
continuous improvement), justin-time inventory, build-to-order
manufacturing, and most of all the
systems thinking embodied in the
“Toyota Way” invite many parallels to
DevOps.
Indeed, standardised and reusable
parts—which have similarities the
small reusable services commonly
associated with DevOps–date to the
Système Gribeauval for cannons in
1765. For their part, the processes and
machinery that Brunel and Maudlay
applied to sailing blocks to standardise
production at the beginning of the
www.intelligentcio.com
Technology Evangelist, Red Hat
…WHILE DEVOPS
IS LARGELY BUILT
AROUND INNOVATIVE
OPEN SOURCE
TOOLCHAINS, IT IS
AT LEAST AS MUCH
ABOUT AN APPROACH
AND A CULTURE
AS ON SPECIFIC
TOOLING; A FOCUS
ON CONTINUOUS
IMPROVEMENT; AN
ETHOS OF SHARING
INFORMATION
AND ENABLING
EXPERIMENTATION.
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