By Lee Ser Wei
Red Hat has launched its Cloud Innovation Practice, a new product and consultancy group that will “on-ramp” companies to get on the cloud.
Born out of the integration of the company’s 2014 acquisitions of Inktank, the Ceph storage system provider, and cloud computing services provider, eNovance, the practice can define and develop operational methodologies and governance for cloud and DevOps strategy development, and deployments across Red Hat’s current portfolio of integrated products and services, such as Openstack platform, Openshift, Cloudforms, and Inktank Ceph Enterprise.
The group will also get to manage its own product research, evangelism, support, and dissemination services.
John Allessio, vice president of Global Services at Red Hat, said, “By combining our unique software distribution and deployment approach with our award-winning products and services, we will be able to help customers of all sizes build an agile and DevOps friendly organization to meet the changing needs of their infrastructure demands.”
The enterprise Linux company has pitched support under the DevOps banner for some time, and had released key tool enhancements for DevOps in their OpenShift last year. Industry segment rivals like IBM had also launched a competing consultancy late last year, DevOps Innovation Services, to customers.
DevOps looks like an inevitable work model, with both Gartner and IDC projecting it to be a mainstay by the coming two years. In fact, even analysts IDC and Gartner had already released their own takes on the subject. For example, Gartner offers a “cookbook”, named “Seven Steps to start Your DevOps Initiative.”
Charles Tang, Senior Program Marketing Manager, Middleware, Red Hat Asia Pacific, helped to explain the evolutionary origin of DevOps, “DevOps is an IT movement inspired by lessons learned from industrial design and manufacturing. The focus is on collaboration, continuous improvement, and simplifying the flow of work through the organisation.
The theory is that Development (Dev) and Operations (Ops) should work side-by-side, delivering smaller chunks of work more frequently on an infrastructure that’s heavily automated and continuously monitored. Operations realises the benefits of standardised and controlled environments and ‘configuration in code’, while Development benefits from a faster application coding, testing, and deployment process which allows the delivery of new application services automatically and frequently.”
One of the earliest adoptions of the term, as far back as 2009, came from http://www.devopsdays.org, where the idea was to take Agile – fast turnaround of small functional changes, and Continuous Integration and Delivery – changes are constantly monitored and build into the product, and extend them into the world of IT operations. These two maturing methodologies was believed to also benefit operations so that the two distinct phases of a software product become a continuous feedback loop of development and direct support from Operations.
CA Technologies, a Red Hat partner, had started transforming their business as well, by building new application services for their customers that will be delivered via the SaaS delivery model, said Tang.
“CA is building these SaaS applications by leveraging both a DevOps methodology and a PaaS platform based on OpenShift Enterprise by Red Hat. By leveraging the automation and continuous delivery technologies that are available within OpenShift, CA is able to move to a DevOps approach give their Developers self-service access to the tooling that they need to be able to make rapid application updates and push them through to the Production application service automatically.
CA is pushing multiple application changes daily to Production servers running in datacentres in California, Australia, and Germany. This has allowed them to rapidly develop, launch, and improve their new SaaS application portfolio. DevOps has been a key factor in their success.”
Wipro had also partnered Red Hat to expand the Wipro portfolio to include service virtualisation, release automation/continuous delivery and continuous validation. Wipro will also receive technical training and accreditation for open source through the Red Hat Online Partner Enablement (OPEN) program.
This would qualify Wipro associates who successfully complete the program as accredited sales specialists, sales engineer specialists and services delivery specialists for both IaaS and PaaS. Additionally, Red Hat would work with Wipro on the DevOps orchestrator tool, to be integrated with the IaaS layer. This would enable automation and application portability ranging from on-premise, private cloud datacentres to the public cloud.
Tang also explained the future Red Hat sees in DevOps, “We will see continued awareness and adoption of DevOps throughout 2015 as more and more organisations gain an understanding of the benefits that it can bring. DevOps helps IT better serve the needs of the business and thus can allow IT to become an asset rather than a cost centre to an organisation.”
Analyst firm IDC had projected that by 2015, 60% of CIOs will use DevOps as their primary tool to address the speed and sprawl of mobile, cloud, and open source applications.
The reason for this, he said was because, “In today’s ‘application economy,’ every organisation is under pressure to accelerate the delivery of application services. Whether to meet revenue or market goals, to increase agility, or to drive innovation, organizations need to produce more applications and accompanying features than ever before.”
Tang emphasised the relevance of this new shift, “Any organisation that relies on software technologies to drive their business forward is a great candidate for DevOps, which in today’s world is almost any organisation. We see DevOps being adopted across all industries ranging from Financial Services to Retail to Government.”
Primarily, DevOps is typically paired as a model to use with cloud – also part of Red Hat’s drive for hybrid cloud models, where larger corporations use a combination of a private network, and a publicly accessible (or outsourced) cloud service suite.
Analyst firm Gartner said it expects strong growth opportunities for DevOps toolsets, with the total for DevOps tools reaching USD2.3 billion in 2015, up 21.1 percent from USD1.9 billion in 2014. By 2016, DevOps will evolve from a niche strategy employed by large cloud providers to a mainstream strategy employed by 25 percent of Global 2000 organizations.
Red Hat itself had also been undergoing the cultural shift to DevOps since 2013, as a company mandate, with an IT change management team named “Inception” backed by CIO Lee Congdon. And the company had benefited so much so that, just recently, president and CEO Jim Whitehurst wrote a book on the DevOps paradigm, and how it will help enterprise IT escape obsolescence.
Tang on the future, “Every organisation is becoming a software development organisation, and as a result of this, they are looking for ways to streamline the application delivery process. By leveraging automation and collaboration, DevOps provides the ability to get new applications and application features to market faster.”
