January 8, 2015
by Evan Powell
This post originally appeared in Virtual-Strategy Magazine.
We are gaining greater insight and knowledge into how high-performing IT operators are using Docker, OpenStack and the overall approach called DevOps. As these solutions continue to be integrated at an accelerated rate, I expect two specific terms will begin to receive much more investigation: “infrastructure as code” and “event driven operations.”
According to research conducted by Gene Kim, Jez Humble and Dr. Nicole Forsgren Velasquez – in collaboration with Puppet Labs – the primary determinant of success whenmoving towards the highly-automated and extremely dynamic approach to building and operating software called DevOps is that all of your configurations are source controlled. This approach is often referred to as infrastructure as code, meaning that you treat the instructions and configurations for your IT truly as code – they reside in the same systems as code resides in, whether that is GitHub or some other such system.
Event driven operations is a newer concept than “infrastructure as code.” It began to breakthrough this fall when Amazon launched AWS Lambda at re:Invent. Used primarily as intra application wiring, AWS Lambda listens to events and then triggers specific code entered by AWS users. This is brilliant on Amazon’s part as it both makes the life of a developer easier and significantly increases the lock-in of those applications. AWS Lambda enables what their CTO Werner Vogels calls “event driven applications.”
By comparison, event driven operations takes a similar approach to invoking wiring when triggered by events and applies it to the overall operations of your IT environment. Hyper scale operators like eBay/PayPal and Facebook have discussed how their respective shifts toward closed loop automation prompted an increase in the productivity of their operations teams by 10-100x over that of a typical enterprise (as measured by the admittedly raw measurement of the ratio of servers under management to individuals in IT operations).
We have heard many leading enterprises including mega banks, medium to large SaaS operators and others call event driven operations “if this then that” for operations, referring of course to the well-known IFTTT application. Their search for IFTTT shows that event driven operations is seeping into the mainstream already.
While “infrastructure as code” is a fundamental approach to how you will build and then manage your environment – and therefore tends to be present any time “real DevOps” is being embraced – event driven operations generally emerges slightly later in the adoption of DevOps. In both cases, however, they are fundamental concepts that we can expect to play a major role in the transformation of IT in 2015.