Software product landscape is at its most competitive thanks to platforms and frameworks and more importantly cloud services, enabling rapid go to market opportunities. Product owners no longer have a 2-3 year horizon, but are up against a 3-6 month time to deliver these days. While the time to market for delivering MVP and first set of releases is compressed, the non-functional requirements have only gotten harder and more stringent. Gone are the days when you could deliver a V1 with moderate levels of scalability or security. These days, customers be it individual consumers or enterprise users place a high watermark for product maturity in terms of scalability, availability, consistency and security right out of the gate. Oops, that is a double whammy!!!!
(current scenario – lower budget, compressed time to market, higher reliability expectations and tighter competition)
This pushes the product owners to a corner and they do not have even minutes to spare for anything but feature identification and development. They can no longer afford to spend time, effort or considerable money on non-functional and product delivery aspects.
They are forced to look for assistance on product delivery, reliability, scalability and security. DevOps, SecOps and CloudOps together make up the set of activities that represent this aspect of the product lifecycle.
DevOps or development operations, is a set of practices that automates the processes between software development and IT teams, in order that they can build, test, and release software faster and more reliably.
SecOps, or security operations, is the ongoing protection of information assets of an organization. This covers the people, systems, and data entrusted to the organization.
CloudOps, or cloud operations, is the formalization of best practices and procedures that allow cloud-based platforms, and applications and data that live there, to function well over a long duration of time.
There is considerable understanding, recognition and maturity on these functions of late. In fact we are moving to a world where All-Ops encapsulates all of these into one. The image below represents the set of activities (in no particular order) that make up the All-Ops or product delivery landscape.
There are many vendors and tools that enable one or more of the functions above. For example, Jenkins and Bamboo for continuous integration; Chef, Puppet, Ansible for config management; Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM (Azure Resource Manager), Google Cloud Deployment Manager for infrastructure as code (infra, network setup); CloudRaxak for OS Compliance; Elastic, Splunk for log management; Vault for secrets management. These tools do a good job on the respective functions that they support. The quandary faced by the product teams is the time, effort and constant catch-up that is required to bring these tools together to serve their product delivery.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to perform all of these activities with minimal effort and dollar expenditure? Don’t worry, we are not in the land of the impossible anymore.
There are products (like Kaiburr) that enable end to end product delivery orchestration by simplifying the activities that make up the above mentioned functions. They provide a product delivery framework enabled through intuitive UI so product owners can quickly configure the scalability, security, governance and reliability requirements for their products and start focusing all of their and their team’s energy on their customer needs, product analysis, product feature development and go to market strategy.
As product owners, business leaders and entrepreneurs step into a highly competitive landscape, it is imperative they utilize innovative tools and frameworks like these to ensure reliable and secure product releases while focusing most of their attention on what their customers need and how best to enable them.
Check out other useful articles on DevOps, DevSecOps, Digital Transformation, Cloud Migration, Cloud Security, Cloud Compliance, Application Modernization, Legacy Modernization, Product Development, Cloud Adoption, Cloud Cost Optimization, Cloud Assessment, Hybrid Cloud, Multi Cloud, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud here.