I asked John Skovron, Senior Director of Engineering at TIBCO, five thought-provoking, high-level questions about how DevOps and Platform as a Service (PaaS) can benefit 21st-century enterprises right now and in the long term.
Steve Leung – What are some of the most common challenges for Development & Operations teams today?
John Skovron – The common challenge is definitely the accelerating pace of software development and deployment. Agile methods have made it possible to design and implement better software much faster. With an “as-a-service” approach, whether for private or public consumption, delivery of new features and versions can accelerate from once-a-quarter to once-a-week, once-a-day, and even multiple deployments a day, utilizing A/B testing or other rapid validation techniques.
Steve Leung – Who should be driving the changes needed, business or IT? What is the role of the CIO in this transformation?
John Skovron – IT should drive the changes – first of all, by aligning IT as closely as possible with the business. And certainly, the CIO should be leading the charge – any CIO who is satisfied with a status quo of sludgy, slow deployments should be brushing up his resume, because he’s going to be looking for a new job soon. [Read more...]
Freeze! With that phrase, a criminal just got apprehended, a child stopped behaving badly, and programmers stopped coding. For the coders, they aren’t about to face punishment like the other two, provided the code works. When it comes to a continuous deployment model for cloud-based projects, it’s the developers’ job to implement and push out changes to the operations team as quickly as possible. In the event of a “code freeze,” operation teams sync all the code from each individual, place it in a repository and test to see if it works. If everything integrated together doesn’t work, it’s back to square one of the software development cycle.
