While it is clear that organizations in Asia Pacific are looking at DevOps as a panacea for achieving greater business agility by enabling improved collaboration between IT development and operations, the way forward on implementing it is less obvious.
Globalization and international competition have accelerated new entrants into market places and disrupted business-as-usual. The markets for enterprises are changing faster than ever, because of the increasingly technological nature of products and services. Even the most mundane products are digital, or marketed through digital channels.
To cope with these changes, organizations must transform themselves by exploiting new technologies, the Cloud, and undertaking initiatives around mobility. Staying competitive includes the digital transformation of software development and delivery processes. Leading Asia Pacific organizations including Huawei and Samsung have already invested significant resources on DevOps to fast-track their products’ time to market.
A changing landscape
The nature of software products has changed over the past decade with the web, mobile and now the Internet of Things (IoT) driving innovation. China is already the largest market in terms of app store revenue, India is the second largest smartphone market and Southeast Asia is experiencing a rapid growth of internet, digital, social media and mobile activity. With more than 320 million internet users in January 2017 and double-digit growth across most countries, the digital sector is booming and attracting lots of interest.
Early adopters of DevOps include Google and Amazon – they continue to lead the way but business returns remain elusive for most implementations.
Micro Focus and DevOps
Micro Focus addresses the DevOps challenge from a software/application engineering and deployment perspective, but this popular on-demand webinar series suggests any major DevOps initiative must include a number of other key disciplines:
- Code – Code development and review, static code analysis, continuous integration tools
- Build – Version control tools, code merging, build status
- Test – Continuous testing, test automation and results to determine performance
- Package – Artifact repository, application pre-deployment staging
- Release – Change management, release approvals, release automation, provisioning
- Configure – Infrastructure configuration and management, infrastructure as code tools
- Monitor – Application performance monitoring, end user experience
DevOps transformation programs and implementation can significantly reduce an organization’s time to market. However, DevOps practices can be challenging to adopt at enterprise scale. The process and behavioral changes can be unsettling to developers, testers – and the IT operations team.
Implementing DevOps is serious work, but it might not be as challenging as it sounds. It is important to pick up from the best practices of global solution providers and learn from their experience across different industries. This will help to alleviate any early concerns and leverage best practice methodologies. Organizations that successfully implemented DevOps, such as FIFGroup, can reap many benefits:
- Increased developer and operational productivity with effective management of infrastructure as code
- Faster release of apps with automated processes
- Enhanced customer experience with near real-time, continuous improvement
Measuring success
With DevOps set for mainstream adoption in Asia Pacific, it is important to keep track of the success metrics that can improve digital practices. Using a complete end-to-end cycle, from coding to monitoring, it is important to ensure that strategy and implementation are measured with collective metrics that will uncover bottlenecks in processes as well as pinpoint areas of good performance for repeatability.
Getting Started
Our eight city APAC DevOps roadshow could help – and seats are filling fast.
If you can’t make it to one of the events and need advice please contact us directly. Don’t forget to check our DevOps blogs for more expert insight from Micro Focus.
