DevOps platforms that provide a self-service environment for developers are the key to unlocking innovative potential and time to market of new solutions.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. By now, most organizations in the business of delivering software will likely have a DevOps strategy. Even if adoption is only partial, the maturity of DevOps enables firms to improve delivery by implementing the tools and practices across their organization that best suit their needs. Once the benefits of DevOps are realized, the business case for scaling DevOps across the enterprise inevitably grows. However, there is a key problem when it comes to scaling DevOps, which is outlined by Gartner’s 2019 prediction that “by 2023,90% of enterprises will fail to scale DevOps initiatives if shared self-service platform approaches are not adopted.” Providing self-service capabilities allows product development teams to quickly provide new features and push changes to customers while also allowing the self-service platform owners to focus on providing new infrastructure automation capabilities to further support the increased product velocity. Orchestrating such a platform is a real challenge for DevOps engineers. In such an environment, a shared platform must be purposely designed to deliver an agile infrastructure that allows multiple teams to consume resources on a self-service basis. This is in stark contrast to a legacy approach to application development in which siloed teams add functionality to applications in their own environments, using the tools and technologies in which they specialize, which proliferates a loss of responsibility from the application when it comes to delivery. For cloud-native applications to be delivered at pace, they must meet specific requirements, such as regulatory and security standards. Under the traditional isolated models, teams are at liberty to use their preferred tools and technologies to meet these requirements in their own environments, adding layers of complexity before passing on the application to a new team and development environment. By the time an application is ready to be deployed, this network of complexity will have gone through a lengthy integration process.
