DevOps for IaC

As with any DevOps practice, the principles on which they are founded must always include a focus on people, process, and technology. With the help of Infrastructure-as-a-code and blueprints, resources, policies, and accesses can be packaged together and become a unit of provisioning the environment. 

The DevOps Adoption RoadMap has evolved over time. What used to be Feature Driven Development around 1999 gave way to Lean thinking and Lean software development around 2003, which was followed by Product development flows in 2009 and Continuous Integration/Delivery in 2010. The DevOps Handbook and the DevOps Adoption Playbook are recent as of the last 5-6 years. Principles that inform practices that resolve challenges also align accordingly. For example, the elimination of risk happens with automated testing and deployments,  and this resolves the manual testing, processes, deployments, and releases. 

The people involved in bringing build and deployments to the cloud and making use of them instead of outdated and cumbersome enterprise systems must be given roles and clear separation of responsibility. For example, developers can initiate the promotion of code package to the next environment but only a set of people other than the developers must allow it to propagate to production systems and with signoffs. Fortunately, this is well-understood and there is existing software such as ITSM, ITBM, ITOM and CMDB. These are fancy acronyms for situations such as:  

1. If you have a desired state you want to transition to, use a workflow,  

2. If you have a problem, open a service ticket. 

3. If you want orchestration and subscribe to events, use events monitoring and alerts. 

4. If you want a logical model of the inventory, use a configuration management database. 

Almost all IT businesses are concerned about ITOM such as with alerts and events, ITSM such as with incidents and service requests, and intelligence in operations. The only difference is that they have not been used or made available for our stated purposes, but this is still a good start. 

The process that needs to be streamlined is unprecedented at this scale and sensitivity. The unnecessary control points, waste and overhead must be removed, and usability must be one of the foremost considerations for improving adoption. 

The technology is inherently different between cloud and enterprise. While they have a lot in common when it comes to principles of storage, computing and networking, the division and organization in the cloud has many more knobs and levers that require due diligence. 

These concerns around people, process and technology are what distinguishes and makes this landscape so fertile for improvements.