In a Bimodal IT, the high speed or Innovative Organisational IT allows a business to respond to or create disruption their market. Two key enablers for this Innovative Organisational IT are: 1. Cloud Services and a Cloud Architecture, and 2. Cloud Serverless Microservice Architecture.

1. 10th March 2016
Bimodal / Two-speed IT and
Cloud Serverless Microservice Architecture
Robert Wilson
Solution Architect
https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertwilsonprofile

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Mature organisations by their nature have significant inertia which can make it difficult to respond
quickly to disruption in their market. Different approaches to improve responsiveness are being
taken by organisations to work around this, these include:
 Start a new business targeted at disruptors, for example Qantas started Jetstar and NAB started
Ubank
 Move IT to a fully DevOps model for agility
 Move to a Bimodal IT / Two-speed IT where part of the organisational IT supports legacy
enterprise systems and part of IT can be disruptive and agile
Introduction

3. Bimodal IT / Two-speed IT

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Gartner introduced in early 2015 the term Bimodal IT and defines it as:
“the practice of managing two separate, coherent modes of IT delivery, one focused on stability and
the other on agility.
Mode 1: is traditional and sequential, emphasizing safety and accuracy.
Mode 2: is exploratory and nonlinear, emphasizing agility and speed.”[1]
Bimodal IT - Gartner

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Mode 1 Organisational IT or Traditional Organisational IT is seen as maintaining the enterprise
systems, the systems of record, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems or Enterprise
Data Warehouse (EDW).
Systems of record are used by employees and support functions including recording transactions and
maintain accounting data.
Mode 1 Organisational IT

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Mode 2 Organisational IT or Innovative Organisational IT is the agile, disruptive and innovative IT
developing with short release cycles for weekly/daily/hourly deployment of features or for A/B
testing.
This mode is to respond quickly to opportunities and changes in market conditions and the focus is
B2C or B2B mobile, collaborative, social applications. These have been termed systems of
engagement by Geoffrey Moore [3].
The systems of engagement can build on and leverage systems of record. Systems of engagement
focus on people and can deliver personalised content on multiple devices. B2C are consumer focused
systems of engagement and B2B are Enterprise systems of engagement
Mode 2 Organisational IT

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McKinsey refers to organisations having two modes of delivery as Two-speed IT where the high-
speed IT can create strategic advantage for the enterprise with low speed maintaining systems of
record [2].
They see Two-speed IT as re-inventing IT to support digitisation as part of an organisational
transformation so as to deliver a strong digital capability in the organisation.
Their approach is to incrementally re-invent IT with Two-speed IT so as to focus the high-speed IT on
high value areas for an initial period. After which agile innovative IT approach is roll out to other
areas of IT.
This approach differs from Gartner in that the aim is to introduce a high speed IT and then eventually
scale it to the rest of IT
Two-speed IT - McKinsey

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McKinsey raises critical projects spanning both IT speeds could become uncoordinated and result in
delays[2]. Also two speed IT functions could fracture IT within an organisation [2]
They see mitigation of this as paying careful attention to governance and accountability structures.
Important is support from CEO and executive team.
As well the CIO must engage business lead support with a road map that delivers value early.
With McKinsey Two-speed IT the end game is to transform all of IT and converge to the high speed
agile methodology and approach which will mitigate a fractured organisational IT.
Risks Associated with Bimodal IT / Two-speed IT

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The drive for an organisation to be innovative creates two important organisational goals of:
1. Greater Agility and Adaptability; and
2. Faster Time to Market.
Innovative Organisational IT

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Four enablers that can realise these organisational goals are:
1. Cloud Services and a Cloud Architecture: IaaS and PaaS;
2. Cloud Serverless Microservice Architecture: AWS Lambda;
3. DevOps and Automation: Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) for faster
more reliable deployments and
4. Data Analytics: to gain knowledge from organisational data.
The following will discuss the first two enablers around the cloud.
Enablers

11. Enabling Innovative Organisational IT with
Cloud Services and a Cloud Architecture

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Cloud Architecture enables an Innovative Organisational IT with the use of public, or hybrid cloud
through self service rapid provisioning of complete environments which include can logical firewalls,
load balancers, servers and databases. As well as rapid creation these resources can be quickly
deleted.
Using a Cloud Architecture with public Cloud Service providers has promoted innovation through not
only the cloud services themselves but also the pace of introduction of new services from the
providers as well as expansion of the number geographical locations. The first AWS service was SQS
and now AWS provides over 50 services in 11 geographic locations with 5 geographic locations more
announced. Azure has 20 geographic locations 5 more announced.
Innovative Organisational IT with
Cloud Services and a Cloud Architecture

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AWS Services

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AWS Regions

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Cloud Services – IaaS supports innovation with agility and flexibility in infrastructure of:
 on-demand provisioning and de-provisioning;
 pay as you go;
 elastically auto scale up and down on load;
 fairly massive scalability; and
 abstraction of resources.
Cloud Services – IaaS

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PaaS is important as to increase innovation you need to reduce the cost of failure.
PaaS reduces the cost of failure by providing platform level services to facilitate:
 Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment - increased deployment frequency with
reduced fear;
 Lean methods - validating hypothesis and pivoting; and
 Experimentation with the use of on-demand application level services.
Cloud Services – PaaS

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Some of the PaaS available in the market place:
 AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS OpsWorks, RDS;
 Azure Web and Worker roles (Cloud Services), SQL Azure;
 Google App Engine; and
 Heroku.
PaaS Providers

18. Enabling Innovative Organisational IT with
Cloud Serverless Microservice Architecture

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Micoroservice Architecture now forms the basis for cloud flexible scalable resilient architectures.
Micoroservices are small cohesive encapsulated autonomous services that work to provide a
focused piece of bounded business capability. Small focused services allow for simple interfaces that
can follow the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) which reduces coupling between services and
increases cohesion within a service.
All communication between Microservices are network based through the REST uniform interface to
avoid tight coupling and enforce a separation of concerns. The knowledge of the persistence is
encapsulated within the Micoroservice which removes database coupling between services.
Micoroservices Overview

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The Cloud Serverless Microservice Architecture is the next step in the evolution of cloud architecture.
Classical PaaS services such as SQL Azure, AWS RDS, Google App Engine have the concept of pricing
and sizing based on instances or cores.
Whereas a Cloud Serverless Microservice Architecture is a microservice based architecture where the
cloud service provider abstracts the compute resource to provide a platform to run business code.
There are no virtual servers / machines / instances to provision, manage or administer.
Cloud Serverless Microservice Architecture

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In AWS the serverless compute service is AWS Lambda launched in late 2014.
AWS Lambda is an abstracted compute service which runs stateless business code (Javascript, Python
or Java) known as a “Lambda function”.
The AWS Lambda compute resource executes code only on request, scales automatically and is
billed in 100ms increments that the code executes.
AWS Lambda - Cloud Serverless Compute

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AWS API Gateway is Amazon’s service introduced in mid 2015 to create RESTful APIs to connect to
back-end features in Lambda or existing HTTP endpoints.
Combining AWS API Gateway + AWS Lambda creates a cloud stateless serverless microservice
architecture.
In REST terminology “stateless” refers to session state being kept on the client [4]. Lambda function
can access application state data from services such as Amazon DynamoDB.
Lambda functions can also access application state from Enterprise Systems of Record that have an
HTTP REST end point through AWS API Gateway. API Gateway can securely connect to the systems of
record HTTP End Point using Client-Site SSL Authentication.
AWS API Gateway

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Cloud Serverless Microservice Architecture
Amazon
CloudFront
CDN
Amazon
Route 53
DNS
Enterprise
Systems
of Record
Amazon
DynamoDB
NoSQL DB
AWS
Lambda
Microservice
Code
Amazon API
Gateway
Microservice API
REST HTTP
Endpoint
Amazon S3
bucket
Static Website
Corporate Data CentreAWS Cloud Services

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 Technology heterogeneity - differing technologies can be chosen for each service and this can be
modified without impact to other services. Thus new technology can be adopted more quickly;
 Scaling - microservices can not only auto scale on demand but there is also the flexibility to scale
only the services becoming a performance bottleneck;
 Ease of deployment – Microservices can be deployed in an agile CI/CD environment. This allows
deployments to be more frequent and can rolled back more easily in event of a failure.
 Composability - As microservices are focused on smaller units of cohesive business capability
these can be more easily composed into higher level services forming composite services and
applications.
 Replacability - As microservices are inherently smaller in size it can be easier and cheaper to
completely rewrite and redeploy these services or make significant changes to take advantages of
technology improvements.
Key Benefits of a Microservice Architecture

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Architecting with microservices is not all peachy. Attention should be paid to:
 Network Considerations - The overhead of a microservice architecture for communications
between services can be mitigated to an extent by using a coarser grained interface. A coarser
grained interface reduces chatter.
 Monitoring - Having an increased number of services will require increased monitoring of the
extra services.
 Fault Tracing – Troubleshooting issues by tracing the path for a request taken through
microservices adds difficultly of fault finding. A distribute tracing system can be used to assist
with this.
Microservice Architecture Considerations

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In a Bimodal IT, the high speed or Innovative Organisational IT allows a business to respond to or
create disruption their market. Two key enablers for this Innovative Organisational IT discussed
were:
1. Cloud Services and a Cloud Architecture, and
2. Cloud Serverless Microservice Architecture.
Conclusion

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• Feb 9 2016, Google has launched Google Cloud Functions, “lightweight, event-based,
asynchronous compute solution” http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/09/google-has-quietly-
launched-its-answer-to-aws-lambda/
• Feb 22 2016, IBM has announced Bluemix OpenWhisk, “OpenWhisk provides a programming
model to upload event handlers to a cloud service, and register the handlers to respond to
various events” "http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/22/ibm-cloud-launches-swift-runtime-open-
source-aws-lambda-competitor-github-enterprise-vmware-support/
Addendum – Recently Launched Serverless Cloud
Services

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1. Gartner BiModal IT Glossary Definition http://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/bimodal
2. Reinventing IT to support digitization - Henrik Andersson and Philip Tuddenham,
http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/business-technology/our-insights/reinventing-it-
to-support-digitization
3. Systems of Engagement and The Future of Enterprise IT A Sea Change in Enterprise IT - Geoffrey
Moore, http://www.aiim.org/~/media/Files/AIIM%20White%20Papers/Systems-of-Engagement-
Future-of-Enterprise-IT.ashx
4. The REST Architectural Style – Robert Wilson, http://www.slideshare.net/wilsonrm/the-rest-
architectural-style
References