We interviewed Declan Morris, former CIO of Splunk on the trends and evolution of DevOps, challenges faced by Developer and Operations team, and what the industry needs in this next phase of evolution.

Here is a transcript of the conversation.

DevOps Challenges Faced by Teams Today

One of the biggest challenges facing the DevOps movement right now is that the crossroads you've got.

• One school of thought that says, take this path, go to the one-stop-shop, we will solve everything for you.
• And the other path is to take this path. You can go with the best of the breed. And that's really what developers and ops engineers are asking for. It is really the best of the breed. 

The challenges that come with the best of the breed tools are, you got to know how to orchestrate all of those components together. That's why I believe that continuous orchestration is a critical function within any DevOps shop these days.

What is Continuous Orchestration

When considering a continuous orchestration solution, there are really three things you want to keep in mind. 

• The first one is the actual toolchain automation. The reason why that's important is you (the developer or the ops engineer) should have the flexibility to decide what tools you want to bring in to your environment, and not be locked into those tools. Because as we know certain tools that do exceptionally well for an exception in a period, and then there are those occasions where you need to swap out for something better. You want that flexibility. So that's key and avoiding the lock-in.
• The second thing that you want to keep in mind is the pipeline. So the continuous pipeline is the ability to string those tools together in the sequence that makes the most sense for you. It can be everything from building your application to scanning to unit testing, whatever that may be. You need to decide on what's right for you and put it in the sequence that works best for you.
• Third, and by no means the least is unified insights. So now you have created this orchestration mechanism, this flywheel that allows you to increase the velocity of your deployments at a greater speed and security is still needs to know what's going on under the hood. How many unified insights, you get that, you see what's going on, You identify where there are potential issues in the pipelines you remediate and you move on. Why? Well, the last thing you want to be doing is spending more time working your CI/CD pipeline versus building products. If something goes wrong, you want the insights to be able to act quickly and swiftly.

So any good continuous orchestration solution worth itself can allow you to focus and narrow in on what the issue is.

Why Now?

The question is why now? Well, the reason being, we are under tremendous pressure to accelerate the digitization of our business and in many cases with the reduced resources that we need. So when you are dealing with that kind of accelerated growth and potentially a decline in resource capacity, and one of the things that you want to avoid is spending those precious cycles in building out CI/CD pipelines versus building a product. So the timing couldn't be better. 

This is what the market is demanding. This is what the market needs. And so you do want to look at solutions such as Opsera that enables you to achieve this with zero lock-in, and with the greatest flexibility, security and reliability.

The value is to be able to deliver products faster, more reliably, and more securely, with fewer defects.

Reach out to us today, if you’d like more information about how Opsera can help orchestrate your DevOps for faster and safer software delivery!