Last week I attended FlowCon in San Francisco. Unlike DevOpsDays and Velocity conferences that I have been to FlowCon had an enterprise focus. Early on in the conference there was a presentation by a typical DevOps poster child. I had a sinking feeling, was I just going to sit through another presentation about all of the cool stuff that is done in Silicon Valley does but doesn’t resonate in the enterprise?
The good news is that this wasn’t the typical story that I have heard so many times. While a lot of time was spent on uptime and scalability, the presentation covered segregation of duties. That’s not something I had heard before and I got a bit excited.
This online company has compliance requirements, just like banks, insurance companies and other verticals that are interested in DevOps and Continuous Deployment but has doubts that it can work in their environments.
According to the presentation the company is able to do Continuous Deployment because they don’t treat all servers in the same way. One of the benefits of service oriented architecture is that services requiring different levels of control and compliance can be handled separately to services that have no such compliance issues. Services that need to be handled in a more restricted manner have restricted access and changes aren’t pushed out automatically. Services that don’t need to be so strictly controlled can be updated many times per day using Continuous Deployment.
This approach was startlingly obvious once I heard it. If you are reading this and would like to take steps on the road to Continuous Deployment or Continuous Delivery and you thought you couldn’t due to compliance issues, could you do something similar? You may not have applications and services that have a service oriented architecture but perhaps it is possible to isolate parts of your codebase so that you can make changes quickly with minimum fuss in some parts of your application.
Continuous Deployment doesn’t have to be all or nothing for your application. If you can deploy quickly to parts of your application and it adds value to your customers then why not give it a try?
For more about continuous delivery, register for our next DevOps Drive-In Webcast, “Enterprise DevOps: Implementing Continuous Delivery with Serena Release Manager.”
