Using DevOps to gain speed, and reduce cost and complexity

Rapidly releasing new digital products and services to market is critical to staying competitive. DevOps is an increasingly common approach to achieving this through agile software development: bringing together developers and operations 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, driving cloud-native and mobile applications, application integration, and modernisation and multi-cloud management. Successful implementations generally 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.

Many organisations are under pressure to deliver faster time to market, adopting containers (Kubernetes) and microservices to modernise their applications to gain speed, and reduce cost and complexity. However, Application Modernisation is a journey, and existing estates of business-critical applications will not all become microservices overnight. Orchestrating deployment of multiple application types (traditional, containers, and hybrid) across multiple platform (VMs, public and private cloud, etc.), using a proliferation of technologies and tools is proving prohibitively costly, time-consuming, and risky.

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.

IBM UrbanCode works alongside Ansible, a configuration automation tool from Red Hat used to build declarative, immutable configuration across infrastructure. Using it, routine tasks involving server configuration files can be declaratively defined and automated.

One characteristic of Ansible is that all tasks should be idempotent, which means that performing an operation once has the exact same result as performing it repeatedly. This allows administrators to effectively define configuration state declaratively and have their automation run repeatedly over their infrastructure to correct problems with configuration drift.

Ansible performs operations without installing agents on the target nodes and connects using SSH. Typically, operations are performed over multiple nodes in parallel from a single control or bastion host. The target hosts are defined in an inventory file, and hosts can be grouped together based on their role.

Automation requires an investment in time, technology, and people, with the reward of being able to solve problems once and scale automation with control and insight. Automation enables collaboration across teams and management of policy enforcement and governance, ring the power. You can configure optional license to use Red Hat Ansible Tower with the automation capability of the IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management console.

Only IBM offers a certified Cloud Paks that provide the RedHat OpenShift platform and cloud-native tools and services, but also, the DevOps tooling required to deploy, govern and test any application anywhere, regardless of where the client is on the journey to modernisation. DevOps4Cloud Paks also provides insights into how to find and crush bottlenecks in the delivery process for faster time to market.

Included in DevOps4CPs are IBM UrbanCode Deploy (UCD) to deploy any application anywhere with repeatable governance and speed, IBM UrbanCode Velocity (UCV) to leverage value stream management and data, and IBM Rational Test Automation Server (RTAS) to accelerate end-to-end testing of multichannel, interconnected applications.

UCD has hundreds of integrations to allow to you to use technology you already have to accelerate delivery to meet business needs across platforms you already have (cloud, Kubernetes, VMs, servers, IBM z and i). This one toolset that can manage everything consistently and orchestrate across systems, tiers or services. UCD is the “everything to everywhere deployer”, with consistent releases from Mainframe to Microservices and Mobile, and audit features and governance built in.

UCV can flag struggling teams and where they are struggling, be it backlog prioritisation, testing, or deployment. It helps manage tool sprawl and identify which teams to help in what areas for organisations with limited resources. UCV will also help show the CIO the organisation’s overall DevOps improvements as a day-to-day ROI dashboard.

USC and UCV and Rational Test are prevalent in the financial service sector and within Government organisations. Large-scale retailers and distributors – typically more mature in their automation and continuous delivery capabilities – to learn insights from UCV about how to remove bottlenecks and manage multiple pipelines.

IBM UrbanCode and Ansible work better together. Ansible may call UrbanCode to deploy a multi-tiered app. Ansible ensures table environments whilst UCD drives application changes through environments. UCV manages the value stream accelerates continuous deliver, using data from UCD and Ansible. UCV also orchestrates varying toolchains, allowing teams the flexibility to choose tools.

With SCC and IBM, our DevOps solutions can improve your time to market, accelerate development and testing, and reduce the number of defects in production. Testing downtime is also reduced due to environment unavailability, whilst better quality systems lead to better reputation with customers.

Learn more IBM’s DevOps solutions including release automation, service virtualisation and application performance management.

 Contact SCC to understand the best options for your business.

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