Industry | In Depth
Shrikanth G
shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in
Decoding DevOps
The escalation of DevOps as a software development hygiene practice is
all set to alter the way IT is being developed and delivered
D
evOps- the chances are you might have heard
this term numerous times. Even market trend
watchers consistently post this as the biggest
trendsetter that will alter software development
methodologies and will have an overall disruptive impact
on enterprise IT.
DevOps is clearly a disruption that will get entrenched in
2017 as IT services companies and software developers
increasingly use this as the key differentiator to be
relevant to business demands and to add value to client
side IT organizations. DevOps is all about agility and
continues delivery that gives a high degree of modularity
to software development.
SETTING THE CONTEXT
Let’s try and understand why DevOps is critical to IT- both
to the supply and demand side. Probably a good starting
point would be to ponder about a key question: What ails
current software development practices and why DevOps
is being touted as the panacea? We posed this question
| A CyberMedia Publication www.dqindia.com February, 2017
to industry experts; this is what they have to say.
Pradeep Shilige, Executive Vice President, Digital
Systems and Technology, Cognizant says, “DevOps may
not be the panacea for all problems and it is certainly an
important capability in addressing them effectively. By
driving automation across the software delivery lifecycle,
DevOps alleviates hand-offs and delivers the ability to
quickly respond to feedback on demand. Further, by
fostering a collaborative culture and necessitating skills
enhancement across IT and operations staff, DevOps
also helps build a more robust organization.”
Experts also say that the software development world is
rapidly moving towards development of next-generation
products and services that are mass-personalized and
deployed at massive scale. These systems are also
typically always on, continuously adapted to changes
and connect the physical and digital worlds. At the same
time, these systems need to be delivered with shorter
development cycles and higher programmer productivity
while maintaining the quality of the offering.
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Industry | In Depth

In the wake of these new rapidly evolving set of

requirements, the question is whether current software
development practices can meet the core objectives
of delivering experience-driven software with shorter
time to market, greater productivity and robust quality.
Unfortunately, the answer to the question is ‘NO’.
Reflecting on this thought Abhay Pendse, Associate Vice
President, Corporate CTO Leadership Team at Persistent
Systems says, “Current strategies (ways, techniques, and
methods) in isolation will not work and will not be effective
to deliver the next generation of software. Appropriate
component strategies across all phases of the Software
Development Life Cycle (SDLC) need to be combined in
a principled, data-driven, and intelligent manner to form
the holistic framework needed to drive next-generation
software development.”
Agreeing to it, Prashant Vasant Burse- AVP - Senior
Delivery Manager, Infosys affirms, “Digital consumers
are driving growth across all business segments. These
smart customers have high expectations and will switch
loyalties if their interactions with digital media do not
meet these expectations. The best way to address the
increasing velocity, variety and volume of such customer
needs is through DevOps. Since, DevOps focuses on
faster deployment to production. It helps with increased
automation using open source or license tools at every
stage of the delivery lifecycle, which includes development,
The Need for DevOps
n Ushers in more business value and better align-
ment of IT
n Makes software development collaborative and
breaks down silos
n Brings in the ability to address the demands of
Application Economy
n Ushers in an elastic and agile software enabled
IT infrastructure
QA, on-demand environment provisioning, production
deployment, and gathering newer requirements to make
applications more customer-centric. DevOps brings
together all these organizations, thereby making the
process of software deployment very lean.”
BRIDGING THE DEV & OPS DIVIDE
Traditionally, ‘Dev and Ops’ have never met eye to eye.
Give that, the question to be asked here is that if we
take a ground zero perspective how difficult is it to
bring together people, process, and technologies under
one umbrella? Experts agree it’s a challenge that can
be combated with a judicious blend of strategy and
collaboration across teams.
Putting this thought in perspective, Prashant Burse

DevOps may not be the panacea for all

problems, it is certainly an important
capability in addressing them effectively

—Pradeep Shilige, Executive Vice President, Digital Systems and

Technology, Cognizant

Current strategies (ways, techniques, and

methods) in isolation will not work and
will not be effective to deliver the next
generation of software
—Abhay Pendse, Associate Vice President, Corporate CTO
Leadership Team, Persistent Systems

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 Industry | In Depth

says, “Certainly, Dev and Ops are part of different
hierarchal structures within an organization. They both
have different visions, missions, and SLA metrics, making
it quite difficult to bring together people, processes,
and technologies but they have the same goals. Here,
standardized processes and the right mindset can drive
collaboration between these teams.”
Clearly, the chasm between ‘Dev and Ops’ is a mindset
problem that can be bridged by a combination of best
practices and until unless both these teams collaborate,
DevOps can never succeed.
Manoj Karanth, GM, Digital Business, Mindtree quips,
“This difficulty arises from determining involved roles and
responsibilities. These change as per the project type
and customer expectations. But more fundamentally, it
is a question of skill. Most of the traditional ‘Ops’ teams
do not have an appreciation of programming. Hence,
infrastructure automation and release management
becomes a challenge at their end.”
“On the other hand, most programmers though do not
have an understanding of how the code they developed
works and scales in the real world. Hence they are
unable to appreciate the design required for scalability,
redundancy, firewalls, backup etc. Hence, getting the
right mix where both these perspectives come together is
the challenge. So, we have a situation where the required
skill is programming, but with a domain understanding of
infrastructure. Cloud computing makes this a little more
manageable,” adds Karanth.
Meanwhile, Madhavan Krishnan, Vice President Cloud
Solutions, VirtusaPolaris Corporation says, “One of the
reasons why it is difficult to bring the ‘Dev and Ops’ teams
to work together in order to meet the business objective
is because of the way teams were goaled and structured
in a form that was good for the past but is not relevant
anymore. The development cycles of yesteryears were long
and companies had independent ‘Dev and Ops’ teams
working in silos because the life cycles of both teams
had minimum overlap, if any. And typically in a period of
transition, during a hand-over between ‘Dev and Ops’,
teams would overlap briefly and there was ample time for
knowledge transfer during the transition process, which is
typically not the case anymore because the product and
development life cycles are shrinking very swiftly.”

The best way to address the increasing velocity,

variety and volume of customer needs is through
DevOps. Since, DevOps focuses on faster
deployment to production. It helps with increased
automation using open source or license tools at
every stage of the delivery lifecycle
—Prashant Vasant Burse, - AVP - Senior Delivery Manager, Infosys

In the traditional development methodology in IT

Services, activities have become too specialized
(Design, Development, Testing, Release
Management, Operations) creating too many
walls. This has resulted in favoring safety over
speed and too many hurdles over time
—Manoj Karanth, GM, Digital Business, Mindtree

| A CyberMedia Publication www.dqindia.com February, 2017 | 17

Industry | In Depth

One of the reasons why it is difficult to bring the ‘Dev

and Ops’ teams to work together in order to meet the
business objective is because of way the teams were
goaled and structured in a form that was good for the
past but is not relevant anymore
—Madhavan Krishnan, Vice President, Cloud Solutions, VirtusaPolaris Corporation

DevOps is an extension of the Agile movement to

include Ops. Agile brings in incremental and faster
cycle times in product development and insists on
a working product at the end of every cycle
—K Nageswara Rao, Vice President, India Technology Center, Unisys

AGILE & CONTINUOUS DELIVERY Abhilash Purushothaman, Country Director, Solution

Experts say that DevOps is about enabling rapid delivery
of capabilities to the end consumers, which requires
collaboration across the software delivery value stream that
includes teams spanning across business, development,
QA, and infra and ops. This entails embracing a set of
capabilities that deliver speed (faster development
and frequent releases), quality (stability & resilience in
production) and value. Software tools are an essential part
of DevOps and the key to orchestrating these capabilities
seamlessly across this software delivery value stream.
DevOps adoption entails building a set of capabilities
across various functions in the organization in terms of
people, processes, and tools. Here, Agile and Continuous
Delivery (CD) are two critical components.
Observes Prashant, “Agility is a business imperative
and is required to respond to ever-changing customer
requirements. Organizations that adopt DevOps can benefit
from faster responsiveness to changing market conditions,
customer sentiment and the demand for high-quality
and low-cost solutions. While CD extends continuous
integration and promotes consistent, reliable and
automated deployments with frequent iterations and fast
feedback loops. CD tools provide visibility to operational
environments, streamline their workflows and automate a
number of builds, release and deployment steps.”
Sales, India & SAARC Region, CA Technologies says,
“DevOps is nothing new, it has in some parts existed
always, but not necessarily called DevOps in the past.
But with the advent of ‘application economy’, continues
delivery and agility has become the key components
and that is the crux of DevOps. To achieve DevOps,
we need to seamlessly bring people, process, and
technologies in a collaborative framework. In the whole
DevOps transformation three elements play critical roles
- continues development, continues testing and continue
release. In sum, all three make up for agile IT delivery.”
While 100% error free code is still a utopia, DevOps
can change the scheme of things here in terms of QA, SW
integrity, cutting down on lead times from development
to test, Beta to production or implementation. To achieve
this DevOps allows continuous software delivery and
stable operating environments cutting down on the time
spent on fixing problems. Enterprises can deploy features
every day in a secure environment using DevOps.
Reflecting on this K Nageswara Rao, Vice President,
India Technology Center, Unisys says, “DevOps is an
extension of the Agile movement to include Ops. Agile
brings in incremental and faster cycle times in product
development and insists on a working product at the end
of every cycle. The challenge that remains is matching

18 | February, 2017 www.dqindia.com A CyberMedia Publication |


DevOps is nothing new; it has in some parts existed
always, but not necessarily called DevOps in the
past. But with the advent of ‘application economy’,
continues delivery and agility has become the key
components and that is the crux of DevOps
—Abhilash Purushothaman, Country Director, Solution Sales,
India & SAARC Region, CA Technologies
the delivery frequency with deployment readiness.
The Operations (IT) teams are concerned about the
stability of their live environments and do not want to
compromise for faster but potentially unstable releases.
It also requires planning often and more cycle time from
operations to deploy. Continuous Integration (CI) and
Continuous Delivery (CD), which are part of DevOps,
address this challenge.
DEVOPS & THE IT ORGANIZATION
Let’s look at DevOps from and its impact on IT
organization. Says Abhay Pendse, “Enterprises are
moving to a virtual/cloud infrastructure (both hybrid and
public) and therefore have the ability to incorporate an on-
demand and cost-effective DevOps solution. DevOps is
especially relevant to the digital transformation journeys
for large enterprises, which tend to have rigid ‘Dev and
Ops’ separations and are accustomed to longer release
cycles. Cloud-source your infrastructure; crowd-source
your development is a mantra for success in today’s
software-driven world for born-in-the-cloud companies
and large enterprises alike.”
IT organizations have the mandate to align IT with
business for tangible profitability and outcomes. So if a
business side of the enterprise requires solutions to start
a project, IT, unlike in the past cannot go back to the
businesses with a long drawn out schedule to deliver the
project. Putting this thought in the backdrop Madhavan
Krishnan says, “IT organizations need a quick way of
responding to these business needs. As, with the tooling
and its ability the advancement of technology (such as
cloud), IT organizations are positioned well to make a big
contribution towards the growth side of the business for
an enterprise.”
“The role of a CIO gets amplified here because of the
| A CyberMedia Publication www.dqindia.com February, 2017
Industry | In Depth
capabilities that the IT organization brings to business by
way of learning, standardizing and institutionalizing best
practices and managing the technology sprawl within
the organization. The enterprise IT is in a very interesting
phase, where they can be strategic for a business if they
are able to bring in new innovations but if they are slow to
respond they face the risk of becoming non-relevant. The
need to lead the change on behalf of their organizations,”
adds Krishnan.
Pradeep Shilige agrees, “IT is one among the many
departments in an enterprise such as human resources,
finance, marketing, business, security and risk. With
DevOps coming into play in IT, all other departments will
be affected to varying degrees. In light of automation, HR
will have to look at revising the roles and responsibilities
of the IT staff. Instead of treating IT as a shared service,
business will be more involved with IT by way of quicker
feedback. Finance will have to look at funding the
integrated collaborative DevOps teams instead of the
earlier functional, shared services-based models. With
frequent releases, security and risk will have to collaborate
even more closely with IT in order to make security and
risk into the continuous delivery cycle.”
OUTLOOK
As Nageswara Rao sums it up, “Adoption of DevOps is
definitely on the rise and will continue to rise further in
2017. However, one-size-fits-all approach cannot work,
as enterprises become increasingly discerning and the
industry matures in use of models like DevOps, Agile-
based and non-linear service delivery. While we have
already seen the emergence of tools that support CI/CD,
the future trend will be a comprehensive CI/CD tool beds
evolving as a single stack. There will be increased focus in
shifting the culture towards DevOps in large enterprises.”
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