The increasing penetration of mobile devices, organisations across industries are investing significantly in agile solutions which would help their workforce access content and applications on mobile platforms. Further, with increasing adoption of cloud infrastructure and virtualisation chief information officers (CIOs) are revisiting their software development LifeCycle (SDLC) to enable continuous delivery of services.
In an interview with tele.net.in, Sumal Karunanayake, vice-president, application delivery, Asia Pacific and Japan, CA Technologies talks about how DevOps methodologies could help operators easily deploy cloud applications and achieve automation and virtualisation.
Excerpts?
What is the scope for DevOps market in the Indian telecom and enterprise industry?
With one of the largest mobile and dynamic subscriber base, the Indian telecommunications market is extremely vibrant and complex. With this vibrancy and complexity there is a significant responsibility to ensure that mechanisms by which one communicates and deepens relationships with customers are in place. One of the most effective means to achieve this is through rapid application release which can be leveraged as a platform for this communication and interaction. These applications traverse not only operations support system and business support systems, but also increasingly into areas such as mobility, customer response management and ecommerce etc.
The biggest challenge for telecommunications companies in India is how they can get more ?wallet share? from their existing business to business as well as retail subscriber base or average revenue per user (ARPU). This manifests itself in services such as managed infrastructure services, applications as a service, infrastructure as a service, cloud, outsourcing and even in some cases BPO. As this heightened requirement for simultaneous release or continuous delivery of applications comes to the fore, so does the requirement to ensure synchronicity between the development and operations functions within the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) supply chain. This is where, a clear and focused DevOps strategy will allow these companies to materially improve their output of quality applications and content.
With the growing adoption of cloud and virtualisation, what are the key issues being faced by companies in integrating their operations?
No doubt cloud and virtualisation have created the ability for companies to provide infrastructure as a service (IaaS) on a rapid scale. But this in turn has created more complexity and heterogeneity within IT environments of large enterprises. As much as the benefits of having IaaS or cloud infrastructure are known and out-weigh any negative implications of managing multiple infrastructure environments, the issues of managing these multiple environments is still a critical one which requires a creative solution. Especially, when organisations are under pressure to release apps faster, optimised for quality and with less opex to do so.
A few other issues faced by companies while integrating their operations are:
Corporate culture shock – IT Managers in organisations will have to shift their focus from an internal service provider to a manager of external service provider and focus more on differentiation and value-add rather than just technical implementation.
Loss of control – As cloud users manage their IT infrastructure through cloud service providers and through service-level agreements, instead of directly controlling their IT environment, IT organisations require additional skills to reinvent themselves in making this shift.
Lacks of standards – Currently, few standards exist to ensure seamless interoperability between enterprise systems and cloud services. The lack of standards create impediments to migration and data recovery.
An effective DevOps strategy will allow companies to put in place environment management processes and capability through the implementation of an end-to-end continuous delivery framework. This becomes especially important when organizations have or are about to adopt Agile development.
How is the Indian telecom market placed vis-vis global markets in the adoption of DevOps?
The business objectives and the dependence on simultaneous release is not restricted by geography but more applicable industry wise. Within telecommunications ? it is of utmost importance in order to reduce customer churn and increase ARPU. DevOps allows these companies to accelerate the output of application delivery and achieve these objectives. There is an increasing trend across mature markets towards the adoption of DevOps. The central point of implementing DevOps has been around the concept of Continuous Integration or Continuous Delivery. However, this is only one aspect of an end-to-end DevOps strategy.
More and more companies in this segment are moving to a wider agile to continuous delivery paradigm in order to create a ?conveyor belt? approach which has deeper hooks into development as well as release management. This is critical if telecommunication companies in India are to differentiate themselves.
What is CA Technologies? approach in encouraging the adoption of DevOps by Indian service providers?
DevOps is now at a stage of maturity and tangibility that any enterprise chief information officer (CIOs) whether it is banking or retail or telecom has to take notice and prepare to implement. At CA Technologies we have already had some significant successes in helping enterprise CIOs to get on the path to achieving DevOps maturity. We believe that when it comes to DevOps ? it?s a business, people, process and technology strategy, in that order. The CIO has to be seen as a relevant business enabler by the CEO and the Board. If this is not the case ? it (DevOps) will be a non-starter.
CA Technologies has four broad pillars to its DevOps vision.
(1)We help organisations to adopt agile development aggressively. We do this through assisting them with overcoming constraints in the development cycle. We refer to this as ?shift left?. That is, the company allow developers access to unconstrained testing environments especially around those dependent systems which typically slow down the development cadence. Through CA LISA Service Virtualisation these development teams or streams can now have access to virtual services which connect to these multiple dependent systems. Additionally, we provide these development teams to test the interfaces early in the SDLC so that the output and quality is optimized. We provide API gateway federation through CA?s Layer 7 API stack. This allows developers to test for connecting multiple data sources especially when they are cloud data sources.
(2) We help to manage and achieve Continuous Delivery. This is achieved through implementing CA LISA Application Release Automation. What this does is put in place a platform for all applications or code which are developed to be seamlessly released without scripting or manual intervention across the different testing phases of the SDLC. In addition, through the CA LISA Cloud Manager, we can dynamically ensure that all of these different environments are set up with the correct configuration levels and capacity to receive these newly developed packages. We refer to this as Agile DevOps.
(3) Organisations need to ensure that the application which has been developed needs to be Continuously Validated for load, stress and use-ability. Through CA LISA Cloud Test, APM and CA LISA Test, we allow the testing phases to leverage cloud based and dynamic load testing and stress testing for N scale scenarios. This is also referred to as enabling Agile Test.
Once the application has been released into production and through the path in the SDLC, we are always gathering performance data so that this data can be mined and injected to optimise regression testing and ensure that when the application is next in development, it will be tested against real life performance data for how it behaves.
What are CA Technologies key offerings in this space?
CA has a comprehensive suite of DevOps Solutions for the telecom and enterprise industry. A few of these solutions include CA LISA Service Virtualization, CA LISA Mobile Test, CA LISA Application Release Automation and CA LISA Data Mining among others.
