Scaling DevOps toolchains across your enterprise
The typical enterprise is an experiment in human scalability. Brilliant startups are small, disruptive, and move fast. Enterprises have decades of experience and skill that made them successful, but also impedes their ability to change up their game to today’s rules of the market.
How can we achieve the innovative culture of a startup, at enterprise scale?
— Typical Enterprise
Clients often ask us, “how can we achieve the innovative culture of a startup, at enterprise scale?” At IBM, we introduced the Garage Method to help clients transform themselves; to apply DevOps release practices along with the IBM Bluemix cloud platform to enable them to take ideas into production without inhibition.
In most teams practices DevOps, their tools live in the cloud just like their apps. As a member of a team that practices what we preach, I love Slack to work with my team — from real work to social team bonding like our Donut integration.
We use git heavily — from open sourcing work on github.com, to running one of the world’s largest deployments of GitHub Enterprise, to our recently announced support for IBM Hosted Git repositories and issues on IBM Bluemix.
We also use PagerDuty to manage incidents and Sauce Labs to run our test suites with every deployment.
Managing a toolchain for one team isn’t that hard — but managing hundreds of tool configurations for hundreds of teams can be complex.
As we scale out DevOps, we’re adding or removing tools to help our team be successful. As an enterprise though, we’re only one team — delivering Bluemix Continuous Delivery — among the 130+ service teams on IBM Bluemix. Managing a toolchain for a team isn’t that hard — but managing hundreds of tool configurations for hundreds of teams can be complex.
With IBM Bluemix Open Toolchains, we’ve reduced toolchains to just another bit of source controlled configuration — to empower individual teams to be self sufficient — and to enable the enterprise to scale standard toolchains to everyone!
Take the example that sets up three prototype microservices along with all of the supporting infrastructure — git, Slack, PagerDuty, Sauce Labs, and our new DevOps Insights capability. As a enterprise, you can create and share toolchains easily — and you can launch and instantiate any of these through Bluemix:
All of the tools required for the team are defined with options that the team can customize to their needs; like the right Slack channel to publish notifications.
Together, the Garage Method and Open Toolchains make it easier for your enterprise to live the values you’re reading about every day. We’re still early on this journey together with our clients, and I very much welcome your feedback or issues on either StackOverflow or dwAnswers.
