Find Harmony across blended Cloud Native and Cloud Enabled architectures
As a startup, you have immense opportunities to build something new without the encumbrance of a large existing product.
But within the enterprise — particularly for Fortune 500 companies in regulated industries, nothing is ever really greenfield. So how do you balance risk tolerance of traditional highly transactional systems with the latest user experience frameworks in Node.js or your favorite platforms?
for Fortune 500 companies in regulated industries, nothing is ever really greenfield
My day to day is focused on exactly this problem. I live this reality with my team as a developer and leader of a development team at IBM, and I’m maniacally focused on solving this problem for our clients.
So with our recent major conference event at IBM Interconnect, we delivered a new ability that allows cloud native teams to harmonize with traditional or cloud enabled teams. Let me give you a quick tour and solicit your feedback.
a new ability that allows cloud native teams to harmonize with traditional or cloud enabled teams
First, we’re deploying cloud native apps on either Cloud Foundry or Docker Containers (with IBM’s new beta support for Kubernetes announced as well). Cloud native teams can construct simple to use pipelines that execute build, deploy, and test along side Third Party integrations like Sauce Labs, Slack, and PagerDuty.
We’re also applying quality policies to understand whether a change meets our conditions for unadulterated promotion to production.
We have a tremendous existing set of clients managing all manner of workloads using UrbanCode Deploy, which works across the spectrum from distributed to mainframe applications of varying complexity.
With that background, lets talk about multispeed IT.
In multispeed IT or bi-modal IT, one culture is focused on speed and team autonomy. The other culture is ensuring a software update doesn’t prevent you from being able to access your bank account, your insurance claims, or your airline reservations due to code which isn’t production ready. On one hand, these worlds seemed opposed; but really each IT culture is managing risk and value to the business in their own way.
each IT culture is managing risk and value to the business in their own way
Enter our new composite, multi-app pipeline. With the composite view, microservices can use their existing delivery pipeline optimized around developer self-service and automated promotion, while cloud enabled workloads running in existing datacenters (even on mainframes) can still be managed with UrbanCode.
If you’re using JenkinsCI for deployment, you’ll soon be able to manage those deliveries from the same vantage point. In the meantime, our DevOps Deployment Risk Advisor can integrate with your existing JenkinsCI today for any traditional apps or microservices that you’re deploying with JenkinsCI.
As new applications are added, we update the deployment plan — a collection of steps that are required to deploy and update the entire system. By default, we group everything in parallel groups; meaning all services are deployed and tested at the same time. But you can also customize these plans to sort tasks or insert manual tasks where parts of your process aren’t yet automated; because deploying to production in the enterprise is rarely as simple as docker run.
So if we pull back the curtain, how are the more complicated monolith or traditional architectures managed? Many of our clients are managing the controlled role out of application components through UrbanCode Deploy. As their build system completes (JenkinsCI, TravisCI, etc), artifacts are generated. Sometimes they go directly into UCD, other times an artifact repository like JFrog’s Artifactory or Sonatype’s Nexus are used.
In the composite pipeline view, we make it easy to add information from your on-prem UrbanCode Deploy estate by running DevOps Connect, which links information into your IBM Bluemix cloud account. The deploy plan can easily be customized to run UCD app deployment before or after your microservices.
So if this looks interesting to you, I invite you to check it out on IBM Bluemix today.
Or take 6 minutes and watch a video demonstration below.
Ask questions on StackOverflow if you see use cases that don’t address your needs in the enterprise or hit me up on Twitter @mdelder.
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