KEY CONCEPT
DevOps
"A culture shift or a movement that encourages
great communication and collaboration to foster
building better quality software more quickly
with more reliability."
when it comes to transformation. In the days of physical hardware, it was often
unfeasible to invest the time and money it took to procure or create new envi-
ronments to try out experiments or a hypothesis. Many enterprises outlawed
experimenting with new technologies without going through a proper vetting
process. This mindset often stifled innovation. I have interviewed clients who
have told me they stopped trying out new ideas because it was so painful to go
through the processes, or because it was discouraged due to perceived risks.
Employees would experiment at home but could not bring these learnings to
work. Stifling innovation often leads to employee turnover because the best
and the brightest love to innovate.
In the pre-cloud days, embracing new technologies was a lot harder than it is
today. For example, let’s say an engineer determines that for a particular work-
load, a non-relational database like Hadoop is a better solution than the exist-
ing Oracle relational database that he or she is forced to use. The engineer
would have to go through a committee to get approval to bring in a new vendor.
Hardware and software licenses would have to be procured. People would have
to be trained or hired to manage and maintain this new technology, and so on.
All of this takes weeks or months to discuss, plan and execute, which almost
always exceeds the time that the engineer has to complete the task. After going
through this process once or twice to no avail, the engineer will not even
bother to bring up new solutions any more.
In the cloud, databases like Hadoop are available as a managed service with a
simple API call. No hardware or licenses to procure, no army of people to man-
age and maintain, and very little time and money is needed to experiment. If
allowed, the engineer could test his or her hypothesis the same day without
involving any other people. If the experiment proved that Hadoop was indeed
the best solution for the specific workload, then the engineer could work with
others to make it an official solution for the enterprise. In order to take advan-
66 | THE DOPPLER | FALL 2017