Transcript of a Briefings Direct discussion on what’s making DevOps such a hot topic and steps that organizations are taking to make it successful.

1. Forrester’s Kurt Bittner on the Inevitability of DevOps for
IT
Transcript of a Briefings Direct discussion on what’s making DevOps such a hot topic and steps
that organizations are taking to make it successful.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Sponsor: Hewlett
Packard Enterprise.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I'm
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and
moderator for this ongoing sponsored discussion on IT innovation and how it’s
making an impact on people’s lives.
Our next DevOps thought leadership discussion explores the building interest in
DevOps that making the development test deployment and ongoing
improvement in software creation a coordinated lean and proficient process for
enterprises.
We're here with a prominent IT industry analyst from Forrester Research to explore with making
DevOps such a hot topic now and to identify steps that successful organizations are taking to
make their applications development and deployment a major force that supports and propels
their business success.
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To Accelerate Business Innovation
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With that, please join me in welcoming our guest. We're here with Kurt Bittner, Principal
Analyst, Application Development and Delivery at Forrester Research. Welcome, Kurt.
Kurt Bittner: Thanks, Dana. Great to be here.
Gardner: We're delighted to have you with us. Let’s start by looking at the building interest in
DevOps. I've been seeing DevOps mentioned more in the last few months than I recall
previously. What’s driving that? What’s this building interest in DevOps all about?
Bittner: It’s essentially the end-user or client organizations that are facing increasing pressure
from competition and increasing expectations from customers at delivering functionality faster.
I was at a dinner the other night, and there were half a dozen or so large banks there. They were
all saying, to my surprise, that they didn’t feel like they were competing with one another, but
Gardner

2. they felt like they were competing with companies like Apple, Google, PayPal, and increasingly,
these startup companies. Square is a good example too.
They're getting into the payment mechanism, and that’s siphoning our business from the banks.
The banks are starting to see drops in their own bottom lines because of the competition from
more traditional technology companies or software companies. You see companies like Uber
having a big impact on traditional taxi companies and transportation.
Increasing competition
So it’s essentially increasing competition, driven by increasing customer
expectations. We're all part of that as consumers where we've gravitated toward
our mobile phones over the last 10 years. We're increasingly interacting with
companies with the mobile phones.
Delivering new functionality through mobile experiences, through cloud
experiences, through the web, through various kinds of payment mechanisms,
all of these things contribute to the need to deliver much faster.
Startup companies get this and they're already adopting these techniques in large numbers. What
we're finding is that the traditional companies are increasingly saying, "We have to do this. This a
competitive threat to us." Like Blockbuster Video, they may cease to exist, if they don’t.
Gardner: Companies like Apple or Uber probably define themselves as being technology
companies. That’s what they do. Software is a huge part of what makes them a
company at all. It defines them. What is it about DevOps that is making this
interest in being very good at software so prominent. What is it that DevOps
brings to the table?
Bittner: DevOps optimizes the delivery pipeline, that’s just the steps that you
have to go through between when you have an idea and when a customer starts benefiting from
that idea. In the traditional delivery processes, you have lots of hand-offs, lots of stops and starts.
You have relatively inefficient processes, and it can take months and sometimes years to go from
idea to having somebody get some benefit out of that.
With DevOps, we're trying to reduce the size of the things you're delivering, so you can deliver
more frequently. Then, you can eliminate hand-offs and inefficiencies in the delivery process, so
that you can deliver it as fast as possible with higher quality.
Gardner: And what was broken? What needs to be fixed? Wasn’t Agile suppose to fix this?
Bittner: Agile is part of the solution, but many Agile teams find that they'd like to be more agile.
They're held back by lack of testing environments. They're held back by lack of testing
Bittner

3. automation. They're held back by lack of deployment automation. They, themselves, have lots of
barriers.
So, Agile is part of it in the sense of involving the business more on a day to day basis in the
project decision making. It also provides the ability to break a problem down into smaller
increments and at least demonstrate in smaller increments, but it doesn’t actually deliver into
production in smaller increments.
Other capabilities
You need to have these other capabilities to do that. One other illustration of how DevOps
helps to accelerate Agile was in talking to a large manufacturing organization that was making
the transition to Agile,
They had a problem in that they weren't able to get development or test environments for
months. IT operations processes had been set up in a very siloed way. Development and testing
environments got low priority when other things were going on.
So, as much as the team wanted to work in an Agile way, they couldn’t get a test environment. In
effect, they were completely stopped from any forward progress. There's only so much you can
do on a developer workstation.
These DevOps practices benefit Agile as well, enabling Agile to really fully realize the promise
that it’s had.
Gardner: Is there a change in philosophy too, Kurt, where some of the startups will put software
out there before its really cooked and let the environment, the real world, be their test bed, their
simulation if you will, and then they start doing rapid iterations? Are we going to start seeing that
now, as DevOps gains ground in established traditional enterprises?
Bittner: You're right. There is a tendency towards getting functionality out there, seeing what the
market says about it, and then improving. That works in certain areas. For example, Google has
an internal motto that says if you're not somewhat embarrassed by your first release, you didn’t
move fast enough.
But we also have to realize that we have software in our automobiles and in our aircraft, and you
don’t want to put something out there into those environments that’s basically not functional.
I separate the measures of quality from measures of esthetic qualities. The software that gets
delivered early has to be high quality. It can’t be buggy. It has to work and satisfy a certain set of
needs. But there's a wide variety of variability on whether people will like it or not or whether
people will use it or not.

4. So when organizations are delivering quickly and getting feedback from the market, they're
really getting feedback on things like usability and esthetics and not necessarily on some critical
business-processing capability, or let’s say the software in your anti-lock braking system (ABS)
system in your car. You don’t want that to fail, but you might be very interested in how the
climate-control system works.
That may be subject to wide variations. To get better fuel efficiency, you may be willing to
sacrifice something in the air conditioner to provide better efficiency. So, it’s largely driving
feedback on sort of non-safety critical features. That's where most organizations are focused.
More feedback
Gardner: You mentioned feedback. That seems to be a core aspect of DevOps, more feedback
between operations, the real world, the use of software, and the development and test process.
How do we compress that feedback loop, not only for user experience, but also data, real data
coming out of an embedded system for example, what the machine is doing, so that we can
improve? Let’s address feedback and compressing the feedback loop.
Bittner: If you think about what traditional application releases do, they tend to bundle a lot of
different features into a single release and put it out there. If you think about this from a
statistical perspective, that means you have a lot of independent variables. You can’t tell when
something improves. You can’t tell why it improved, because you have so many variables in
there.
In the feedback loop with DevOps, you want to make the increment of release as small as
possible, basically one thing at a time, and then measure the result from that, so you know that
your results improve because of that one single feature.
The other thing is that we start to shift towards a more outcome-oriented release. You're not
releasing features, but you're doing things that will change a customer’s outcome. If it doesn’t
change a customer’s outcome, the customer doesn’t really care.
So by having the increment of a release be one outcome at a time and then measuring the result
from that, you get the capabilities out there as quickly as possible and then you can tell whether
you actually improved because of what you just did. If you didn’t improve, then you stop doing
that and do something else.
Gardner: Is that what you mean by continuous delivery, this iterative small parts, rather than the
whole big dump every 6 to 12 months?
Bittner: That’s a big part of it. Continuous delivery is also, more precisely, a process by which
you make small changes. You optimize the delivery cycle, removing waste and hand-offs to
make that as fast as possible with a high degrees of automation, so that you can get out there and
get the feedback as quickly as possible.

5. So, it’s a combination. It needs not just fast delivery, but a number of techniques that are used to
improve that delivery.
Gardner: Folks listening and reading this might very well like the idea of DevOps. I'd like to do
DevOps; where do I buy it? DevOps, though, isn't really a product, a box, or a download. It’s a
vision, a way of thinking in architectural approach. How people go about implementing
DevOps? Where do you start?
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Bittner: You’re right. It's more of a philosophy than a product. It’s not even really a product
category, but a bunch of different products, and processes, and to some degree, a philosophy
behind that. When we talk to organizations that implemented this successfully, there are a couple
of patterns.
First of all, you don't implement DevOps across an entire organization all at once. It tends to
happen product by product, team by team. It happens first in the applications that are very
customer facing, because that's where the most pressure is right now. That’s where the biggest
benefit is. So on the team-by-team basis, first of all you have to have some executive mandate to
make a change. Somebody has to feel like this is important enough to the company.
While developers, engineers, and IT Ops people can be passionate about this, it typically requires
executive leadership to get this to happen, because these changes cut across traditional
organizational silos. Without some executive sponsorship, these initiatives tend not to go very
far.
The first step – and this is sort of very mundane area -- tends to be changing the way that
environments are provisioned. That includes getting environments provisioned on demand, using
techniques like infrastructure as code to automatically generate environments based on
configuration setting,s so that you can have an environment anytime you need it. That removes a
lot of friction and a lot of delays.
The second thing that tends to be implemented are techniques like continuous integration and
then, after that, test automation, based on APIs. There's a shift to APIs on an integrated
architecture for the applications, and then usually deployment automation comes after that. Once
you have environments provisioned in code that you can put into those environments, you need a
way to move that code between environments.
As you make those changes, you start to run into organizational barriers, silos in the
organization, that prevent effective working together. There's too much wait time when people
are assigned to multiple projects or multiple applications.

6. There's a shift in team structure to become more product oriented with dedicated resources to a
product, so that you can release, and do release after release most effectively. That tends to break
the organization silos down and start shifting to a more product-centric organization and away
from a functionally oriented organization.
All of those changes together typically take years, but it usually starts with some sort of
executive mandate, then environment provisioning, and so on.
Management capability
Gardner: It sounds too that having a better management capability across these silos with
metrics, dashboards, validating efforts, being able to measure discretely what's going on, and
then reinforce the good and discard the bad is important.
Are there any particular existing ways of doing that? I'm thinking about the long-term
application lifecycle management (ALM) marketplace. Does that lend itself to DevOps? Should
we start from scratch and create a new management layer, if you will, across the whole
continuum of software design, test, and delivery?
Bittner: It’s a little bit of both. DevOps is really an outgrowth of ALM, and all of the aspects of
ALM are there. You need to be able to manage the work, track the work, and to determine what
work got done. In addition to that, you’re adding automation in the areas that I was just
describing; environment provisioning, continuous integration, test automation, and deployment
automation.
There's another component that becomes really important, because out of those applications, you
want to start gathering customer experience data. So things like operational and application
analytics are important to start measuring the customer experience.
Combining all of those into a single view, single dashboard is evolving now. The ALM tools are
evolving in that direction, and there are ways of visualizing that, but right now it tends to be a
multivendor ecosystem. You don’t find one DevOps suite from one company that provides
everything.
But the good news is that the same thing that’s been happening in the rest of the industry around
services and interoperability has happened in applications. We have a high degree of
interoperability between tools from different vendors today that allows you to customize this
delivery pipeline to give you the DevOps capability.
Gardner: It seems that, in some ways, the prominence of hybrid cloud models, mobile, and
mobile-first thinking, when it comes to development, are accelerants to DevOps. If you have that
multiple cloud goal, you're going to want to standardize on your production environment. Hence,
also the interest in containers these days. And, of course, mobile-first forces you to think about

7. user experience, small iterations apps, rather than applications. Is that what’s happening? Do you
see an acceleration from these other trends reinforcing DevOps?
Bittner: It’s both reinforcing it and, to some degree, causing it, because it's mobile that’s
triggered this explosion and the need for DevOps, the need for faster delivery. To a large degree,
the mobile application is the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Very few mobile applications stand
alone. They all have very rich services running behind them. They have systems of record
providing the data. Virtually every mobile application is really a composite application with
some parts in the cloud and some parts in traditional data centers.
The development across all of those different code lines and the coordination of releases across
all those different code lines really requires the DevOps approach to be able to do that
successfully.
Demand and complexity
So it's both demand created by higher customer expectations from mobile customers, but also
the complexity of delivering these applications in a really rapid way across all those different
platforms. You made an interesting point about cloud and containers being both drivers for
demand and also enablers, but they're also changing the nature of the work.
As containers and microservices become more prevalent -- we’re seeing growth in those areas --
it's increasing the complexity of application delivery. It simplifies the deployment, but it
increases the complexity. Now, instead of having to coordinate dozens of moving parts, you have
to coordinate hundreds and, we think, in the future, thousands of moving parts. That's well
beyond what somebody can do with spreadsheets and manual management techniques.
The other thing is that cloud simplifies environment provisioning tremendously and it provides
this great elastic infrastructure for deploying applications. But it also simplifies it by
standardizing environments, making it all software configurable. It's a tremendous benefit to
delivering applications faster and it gives you much more flexibility than traditional data-center
applications. There's definitely movement towards those kind of applications, especially for
DevOps.
Gardner: When I heard you mention the complexity, it certainly sounds like automating and
moving away from manual processes, standardizing processes across your development test-to-
deploy continuum, would be really important steps to take.
Bittner: Absolutely. I would say more than important. It’s absolutely essential that, without
automation and that data-driven visibility into what's happening in the applications, there's
almost no way to deliver these applications at speed. We find that many organizations are
releasing quarterly now, not necessarily the same app every quarter, but they have a quarterly
release cycle. At quarterly rates of speed, through seat of the pants and sort of brute force, you
can manage to get that release out. It’s pretty painful, but you can survive.

8. If you turn up the clock rate faster than that and try to get down to monthly, those manual
processes completely fall apart. We have organizations today that want to be delivering at weekly
and daily intervals, especially in SaaS-based environments or cloud-based environments. Those
kinds of delivery speeds are inconceivable with any kind of manual processes. As organizations
move away from quarterly releases to faster releases, they have to adopt these techniques.
Gardner: Listening to you Kurt, it sounds like DevOps isn't another buzzword or another flashy
marketing term. It really sounds inevitable, if you're going to succeed in software.
Bittner: It’s inevitable and over the next five years, what we’ll see is that the word itself will
probably fade, because it will simply become the way that organizations work.
Gardner: Great. I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. We've been exploring the popularity of
DevOps for making sure development, test, deployment and ongoing improvement in software
creation are coordinated, lean, and proficient process. We've heard from a prominent industry
analyst at Forrester Research about what’s making DevOps such a hot topic and steps that
organizations are taking to make it successful.
Please join me in thanking our guest. We've been here with Kurt Bittner, Principal Analyst
Applications Development and Delivery at Forrester Research. Thank you, Kurt.
Solutions That Unify Development and Operations
To Accelerate Business Innovation
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Bittner: Thank you, Dana.
Gardner: And a big thank you also to our audience as well for joining us for this DevOps
thought leadership discussion. Case studies are also going to be part of our repertoire here and I
look forward to more of those on BriefingsDirect.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of
HP-sponsored discussion. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Sponsor: Hewlett
Packard Enterprise.
Transcript of a Briefings Direct discussion on what’s making DevOps such a hot topic and steps
that organizations are taking to make it successful. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC,
2005-2015. All rights reserved.
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