By Emmanuel Forgues
Hyperconverged technologies (Nutanix, Simplivity, VCE) and companies facing the DevOps paradigm
To survive today, a company faces a challenge: the balance between development time and market demand. It is not possible to wait 6 months to come up with an application. The release of a new OS (Android, IOS, Windows, …) requires immediate reactivity or the company might face a potentially heavy financial penalty or just miss a new market. However, we must not confuse speed with haste when marketing cannot wait, especially in an economic context crippling budgets. Just look at the sad example of the mobile application deployed urgently, at the request of the French authorities to inform on terrorist actions. This application (SAIP), developed in 2 months by a team of 15 engineers functioned for a few hours only after the attack in Nice.
The new convergence and hyper-convergence solutions provide companies with the rationality of an infrastructure to face the challenges of DevOps. The major publishers have different approaches but should eventually be able to integrate a broader range of technologies into a single offer.
The non-named problems encountered in business:
Two technical entities participate in the development of all the companies relying on IT.
On one hand, the development team (DEV) which produces IT solutions both for internal or external use, and, on the other hand, the operation team (OPS) which provides DEV with the necessary tools and maintains them. We see that their goals are often contradictory within the same company, in fact their alignment is a strategic and economic challenge for IT departments.
For convenience we will speak of DEV for Development and OPS teams for Operational teams.
Where is the brake between market demands and technical services? Why is DEV not reactive enough? First answers: because they are hamstrung by overly rigid infrastructure, inadequate service catalog and physical or virtual infrastructure without « programmability » capacity. Why are OPS not reactive enough? It is likely that they are not sufficiently involved with the DEV teams to meet their expectations.
Obviously the physical and virtual infrastructure has to change to become more programmable. At the same time the DEV must be able to program infrastructure and OPS must be able to understand and control the interactions of DEV with the infrastructure. In short, the difficulties between DEV and OPS are as follows:
We will call « DevOps » the necessary confrontation between these two teams. DevOps is the concatenation of English words Development and Operation
