DevOps by SCC and IBM

Bringing together people, processes and technology

The newest approach to software agile development, DevOps brings together developers (dev) and IT operations (ops) teams to build, test, deploy and monitor applications with speed, quality and control. DevOps is relevant to any kind of software project regardless of architecture, platform or purpose. It drives cloud-native and mobile applications, application integration, and modernisation and multi-cloud management.

The challenges

Business pressures demand faster time to market. Organisations are rapidly adopting containers, Kubernetes, and microservices to modernise their applications to gain speed, and reduce cost and complexity. Together, SCC and IBM recognise application modernisation is a journey, and that existing estates of business-critical applications will not all become microservices overnight.

Orchestrating deployment of multiple application types across multiple platforms using a proliferation of technologies and tools is proving prohibitively costly, time-consuming, and risky.

• Risks related to continuous delivery
• Slow time to market
• Hard to create audit reports
• Errors related to manual application deployments
• Too many tools used for deployments – need to consolidate on one CI/CD process
• No way to deploy easily to IBM Z series with standard tools
• Unsure how to improve speed or quality – no visibility into bottlenecks
• Poor product quality
• Unable to scale up test execution or run it easily on Cloud environments

The solution

Successful DevOps implementations rely on an integrated set of solutions – a ‘toolchain’ – to remove manual steps, reduce errors, increase team agility, and to scale beyond small, isolated teams.

IBM offers a certified Cloud Pak for Applications that provide the RedHat OpenShift platform and cloud-native tools and services as well as the DevOps tooling required to deploy, govern and test any application anywhere, regardless of where you are on the journey to modernisation.

IBM UrbanCode: Better software, faster

Agile development teams use build management, deployment automation and release management solutions like IBM UrbanCode® to accelerate and optimise software delivery. UrbanCode can enable continuous delivery for any combination of on-premises, cloud and mainframe applications by eliminating manual, error-prone processes.

Red Hat Ansible: Ultimate automation

Red Hat Ansible Tower is an internet-based hub that runs your automation tasks. It is a configuration automation tool used to build declarative, immutable configuration across infrastructure. Using it, routine tasks involving server configuration files can be declaratively defined and automated. Red Hat Ansible Automation is trusted by over 1,500 organisations across multiple verticals and geographies, backed by one of the top ten open-source communities worldwide.

UrbanCode and Ansible: Better together

Use Ansible playbooks to quickly spin up environments on any cloud platform or VM. Ansible may call UrbanCode to deploy a multi-tiered app. Ansible ensures table environments whilst UrbanCode Deploy drives application changes through environments. UrbanCode Velocity manages the value stream and accelerates continuous delivery, using data from UrbanCode Deploy and Ansible. UrbanCode Velocity also orchestrates varying toolchains, allowing teams the flexibility to choose tools.

DevOps: The benefits

• Improved time to market
• Development and testing shifts left and accelerates
• Reduced number of defects in production
• Reduced testing downtime due to environment unavailability
• Better quality systems = better reputation with customers
• Cloud Performance testing provides high ROI for a low TCO

Why SCC and IBM?

 SCC has partnered with IBM for almost 40 years, bridging the gap between business needs and technology to deliver world-class solutions. From IBM’s technology to its people and vision, we work with our customers to deliver the strongest, most agile solutions. With a specialist dedicated IBM team, we are able to offer that extra support needed when helping our customers plan, integrate and manage their projects.

Contact SCC to understand the best options for your business.

For more information, please contact Steve Mecklenburgh at steve,[email protected]