Better Together
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: your team released a near-catastrophic failure into production. When the smoke clears, you hear the following: your operations team thinks your developers are irresponsible and being cavalier with changes. And your developers think operations is an obstacle slowing things down. Release cycles last forever (or get cancelled). Customers/Users are angry. Management is calling. Where do you go from here?
The answer is DevOps.
The DevOps movement is building a ton of momentum and for good reason. DevOps helps organizations collaborate to build high quality working software and deliver it into production quickly and frequently. It embraces continuous delivery, continuous integration and automation, and works to reduce the process of releasing software from weeks of approvals to just a few keystrokes or none at all.
Too good to be true? Not at all. Our experts address the people, process, and technology aspects of DevOps. We know the tools and the processes to get your teams talking and producing – and perhaps even enjoy working together again!
GE Capital
General Electric (GE) Capital has been on a several-year journey to transform their culture in how they work; particularly in IT. GE knew that that this cultural change within the organization was imminent, but also were aware that as a company with an aging history, with some important institutional knowledge, they had to think about balancing the old with the new. The drivers for needing to move down this path was a heightened regulatory environment and GE Capital’s need to meet particular regulations. What this meant was that the infrastructure environment they were running was high risk and would be difficult to show compliance with. GE wanted to control the environment using DevOps.
There is a key thing to remember here – many highly regulated organizations balk at the idea of using DevOps because they see it as a real risk in terms of compliance. Here we have an organization that literally saw DevOps as the enabler of compliance. The second benefit of DevOps for GE Capital was cost management – the company has saved significant money by building consistency across its infrastructure needs.
Enter Iterum
Our DevOps subject matter experts (SMEs) worked with GE to develop a two-pronged approach – where traditional applications remain on existing hardware and infrastructure but are then wrapped in such a way as to allow more agile teams to build applications that interact with that core data. It was imperative to understand that the old and new needed to be integrated, since most companies sans startups can’t afford to throw out all of the institutional knowledge they’ve acquired over the years.
Our SMEs assisted in formulated so-called “speed teams” that took individuals from various departments within the organization and put them together for six months at a time. These teams were mixed with contractors who had exposure to high-speed innovation. Without the input of existing staff with their awareness of why some things do or don’t happen, the project would have failed; this was a very strategically calculated decision to go down this route. From there the core foundation and ethics of DevOps coupled with it’s array of toolings were leveraged to drive an onset organizational change. Like an infection of the best kind, the goal was to start small and nurture till it was ready to spread throughout the organization.
GE Capital had a target of onboarding over four to five hundred applications into its DevOps environment; the first year they were able to move one hundred applications across. The idea was and still is to get the ball rolling and allow the organization to operate in an agile, test-driven mode. The SMEs at Iterum were able to get the developers at GE to start thinking like engineers and constantly get better at building quality self-sustaining codebases. Once this self-perpetuating movement started to take shape from within the organization, that’s when we were able to realize a DevOps oiled machine truly running its course.