The Doppler Quarterly Special Edition 2019 | Page 63

One of the biggest value propositions of the cloud is agility. Enterprises are leveraging
the public cloud to accelerate delivery of new services and features at speeds not seen
before. But in order to achieve agility, enterprises need to do more than just learn how
to leverage cloud services. They also need to assess their legacy baggage and trans-
form the way they think about software and delivery.
Legacy baggage comes in many forms. Many of the vendor solutions that enterprises
have embraced in the era of the data center do not have a viable equivalent in the public
cloud. Many legacy processes
were derived in the days of
biannual releases, which get in
the way of progress in the era
of continuous delivery. To be
agile, legacy organizational
structures, built to control
costs and dictate policy must
give way to new organiza-
tional structures that promote
high levels of collaboration,
transparency and shared
goals.
To be agile, legacy
organizational structures,
built to control costs and
dictate policy must give
way to new organizational
structures that promote
high levels of collabora-
tion, transparency and
shared goals.
As I have written in the past —
and many of my colleagues
agree — agility is the new cur-
rency. Cloud is one part of the
equation. Getting out of the
data center business and
embracing cloud APIs is a great step forward. However, embracing the cloud without
embracing the need for transformational change is a losing proposition.
The Solution: Go Big on DevOps
Many people equate DevOps to IT Automation or even CI/CD. Automation and CI/CD
are components of DevOps that you will typically incorporate into your DevOps journey
but they are not DevOps in and of themselves. Our definition of DevOps is “a culture
shift or a movement that encourages great communication and collaboration to foster
building better quality software more quickly with more reliability.” DevOps is the pro-
gression of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) from Waterfall to Agile to Lean.
When we perform DevOps maturity assessments with our clients, we assess their matu-
rity across three spectrums: People, Process and Technology.
DevOps and People
Within the people domain, we evaluate enterprises in four categories: innovations, skills,
culture and collaboration. Innovation is a much overlooked area when it comes to trans-
formation. In the days of physical hardware, it was often unfeasible to invest the time
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