A little while back I did an email interview with Ray Wang from iThome Weekly, in Taiwan. It’s a little piece about DevOps getting more and more into the enterprise. To read the Google, robot translation, it looks like I did some things “single-handedly,” where in fact I was one of many hands.
As always, here’s the original email exchange we had:
Q. You mention about software-defined business in your article, can you tell more details about what is software-defined business? Why CEO have to think about the software-defined business？ Why DevOps is so important for software defined business?
“Software defined businesses” are companies that are using custom written software to dramatically change and enhance how they run their business. Uber is a good example. Instead of just being a taxi or car service, they use software they wrote to change how their business runs: calling and paying for a taxi on your sell phone is much different than hailing a cab and paying in cash. Insurance and banking companies that are moving more and more of their daily business and interaction with customers to run over mobile apps and other custom written applications are another good example; we see this happening at Pivotal customers lie Allstate, Humana, and banks that use Pivotal Cloud Foundry.
Q: What’s your definition of DevOps? Does DevOps equal to Continuous Delivery? Which definition of DevOps you don’t like most and why?
In general, I think of DevOps as the process and “culture” you wrap around continuous delivery to get the full effect of CD. I tend to speak about them interchangeably at this point; I suppose you don’t need DevOps to get the full benefits of continuous delivery, but they seem to go together well (you could always have just a jelly or just a peanut butter sandwich, but they seem to show up together a lot). CD is always looking to automate as much as possible, delivery to production frequently, and use the feedback loop this rapid cycle gives you (you an observe what your users does each week or day instead of each six months) which are many of the things DevOps seeks to enable as well.
It’s easy to get caught up in DevOps conversations that spend all of them time talking about “culture” and the need to change. I’m interested in that, but I always want to hear about actual, tactical things companies can do to get the benefits of DevOps. We all know how businesses use IT needs to change to be better, and that it’s hard to do so. I want to make sure the overall community is giving advice that’s helpful and, dare I say it, “actionable.”
Q: Should companies have to implement agile development before implement DevOps? Why?
It certainly helps to know what agile development is as a school of thought and to have done some form of agile to trust that way of thinking. If you’ve never done agile before, it just becomes part of trying to do DevOps. It’s certainly hard to think of being successful at DevOps without also doing agile software development.
Q: If CIO want to tell his CEO boss about what’s the value for non-technology companies , what’s your suggestion?
Time to market is the main, measurable, benefit. What that means, to me, is that software is being given to customers more frequently. New features and fixes come out weekly instead of once every 6 to 12 months. The business (the CEO) has to figure out what to do with time to market. If you can put a new features in production each week, how will that help the business? In the consumer space (where much of this mentality comes from) you can add more and more features to out-compete competitors. In the business space, the actual business has to change and evolve at a fast pace to fully take advantage of time to market. All that said, I don’t think any CEO is satisfied with the pace of change in IT. They’d all like it to move not just “faster,” but to get more meaningful features in production more often. Humana provides an interesting example: because they had been honing their software delivery process they were able to launch an Apple Watch app in just five weeks. That timeline is pretty amazing for most enterprise IT projects, let along being in the App Store on the first day of the Apple Watch’s release.
Q: Gartner say 2016 will be the year of DevOps. Do you agree with that? why or why not?
Sure, but I think you’ll see the next 3 or so years be the year of DevOps. I don’t think there’s any one year in particular that will stand out. I don’t think there was “a year of Agile Software Development” in the 2000s, it just took over slowly. What important is for companies to understand what DevOps can help give them - faster time to market for their software-driven products and services - and figure out what they’d do with that new ability. “Doing DevOps” is not easy, so you really need to value the end result or you’ll likely loose interest in the transformation process and let it unhelpfully fizzle out.
And, check out the recording of the DevOpsDays Austin talk referenced in the article if you’re interested.