Belgian surrealist artist René Magritte said, “Perception always intercedes between reality and ourselves.” Take a smartphone. It is far, far more than a phone. It’s an all-in-one communications, entertainment, and retail centre. It satisfies modern demands for instant service, instant messaging, and instant gratification. People want it all and they want it now—immediate upgrades and improvements, new features, no bugs, and smooth transitions.

So what makes our customers any different?

Enter DevOps, which aims to combine software development and IT operations (ITOps), shortening development lifecycles by providing continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) with high software quality. Complementing the Agile methodology, DevOps looks to deliver software better, faster, safer, cheaper, and happier than before.

Breaking down the barriers defining the silo mentality that plagued development for decades, DevOps is not only about adequate automation, sufficient scheduling, and tolerable tooling. It’s also about a culture of communication, people, practice, and process. But is everything in the DevOps garden quite as rosy as the idea suggests? Here’s where perception and reality can clash.

Imagine this conversation: “Update your app? No problem. Update your OS? No worries. Want a database change? Sure. Unload, drop, recreate, reload. Oh, sorry. you didn’t say you didn’t want an outage…”

Every database administrator (DBA) knows that you don’t replace an entire database, or even a table for every schema change. IBM® Db2® has become far more capable of handling online schema changes with ALTERs and deferred share-level change reorgs. There’s always that little outage though, isn’t there? The dreaded switch phase. Now, there are tools available to help developers perform more software changes more frequently. We call this the “release velocity.”

Database schema changes, however, do not traditionally take the same path. Database release velocity is generally far slower. It can take minutes to deploy a new copy of code. It can take hours or even days to unload, drop, recreate, and reload a multi-terabyte tablespace. This is the “deployment gap,” or “velocity gap.”

How do we solve it? Well, let’s consider the wider world, and a bit of history. With traditional waterfall development, no real value is delivered until the very end of a project when code moves to production. With Agile, you can deliver improvements in smaller chunks more frequently, adding value incrementally over time—and start much earlier in the project lifecycle, instead of waiting until the very end of what can be a monolithic process. And when development processes are properly automated, which is encouraged in DevOps, the results can be less risky, even when teams put out releases more often.

You’ll also hear the term “shift‐left” when discussing DevOps. The traditional development process moves through multiple stages from left to right, starting with requirements gathering and ending with deployment and ongoing support. The shift‐left mentality looks to perform processes that typically happen later, earlier in development.

Now, developers have a well-defined automated process or pipeline to deploy code from system to system. However, when there’s a schema change involved, the process must stop. It becomes a manual process of contacting the DBA (perhaps through Remedy or a ticket system) and the DBA finding time to determine what the developer is doing, what has changed, will it impact my system, does it follow our standards, do I have time to deploy it, etc. Throughout all of this, the development process is on hold.

Of course, we still need the DBA, but their expertise and role need to be integrated into the DevOps process.

In DevOps, developers (including development DBAs) and operations (including production DBAs) need to work together to deliver changes at a pace that satisfies both operational availability and development targets. Don’t invite DBAs to your scrums only when you need them to implement an emergency change to a development environment because they haven’t got the authority to do it themselves and have stalled. They need to be involved from the very beginning of the project design, from Scrum Zero!

Databases are not the same as applications. Changes need to be made before code changes, otherwise your BINDs will fail. There is also a much higher risk to database changes because you are affecting user data. Do it wrong and there’s a serious impact. Change code and you affect one application. Change a database and you can affect many other shared systems. In short, your DBA is the best person to give you a wider view of system dependency. For too long, developers have thrown database requests or poorly performing code over the wall to a DBA who does their best to make it worthy of production, and throws it, along with any database changes, over the wall to operations.

DevOps is about people, process, and tooling. We need a culture change so we can move at a speed that our customers now expect from us. This culture change extends to the database level, involving the DBA from the outset—the DevOps DBA. And we need to trust and empower developers to make their own changes, as and when they need to. This requires new ways to treat database changes as code, and to integrate them into the automated deployment pipeline. And believe me, it’s easier than it sounds—we just need to change our perception of “who does what and when” to create a new and more effective reality.

The IT industry is constantly changing, developing, and improving. As IT professionals on the cutting edge of tech innovation, we also need to adapt, become agile, and keep up. Our customers look to us and our solutions to help them pilot their enterprise through the digital ocean. So, what’s driving this continuous evolution?

Every year, the British Computer Society produces The IT Leaders’ Report, which is similar to our own Annual Mainframe Survey, but with a wider, more generic scope, and a singularly British take. In the latest edition, UK IT leaders across industries were asked to choose their top five priorities. I wondered how the trends had changed over the past few years, and by how much, so I collected the data from 2014 to 2020.

Around 300 IT leaders were asked what their top 5 priorities were. In 2020, 52% put Security as one of their top 5, 52% put Cloud, 36% put IT governance, and so on.

Behind the numbers

Looking back across the past seven years’ results, we can observe a shift in priorities as fads changed and new technologies arrived.

• There were two unusual spikes in the data for accessibility in 2017 and GDPR in 2018, which could be related to businesses putting off regulatory changes until just before the deadlines.
• Social media was important in 2014 and 2015, and by the time everyone caught onto it, it vanished.
• Over the same period, offshoring was on everyone’s minds, but by 2016 the industry had caught up, so it also dropped off.
• Blockchain appeared in 2018, and quickly lost some of its audience’s interest, presumably due to the electricity cost (equivalent to powering all of Ireland) to support it. It’s still trundling along though, just in case.
• Recent addition IT governance suddenly appeared in 2016 and is not going away any time soon.

The Autonomous Digital Enterprise

In the report, data science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are suddenly important growth areas, and DevOps, automation, and Everything-as-a-Service models have also become top agenda items. That’s not a surprise. They’re all key factors in the Autonomous Digital Enterprise (ADE), a forward-looking vision of the future state of business in which agile, customer-centric, insight-driven companies evolve their operations to drive innovation in the midst of persistent disruption. How does the data from The IT Leaders’ Report correlate to the ADE?

IT security

Adaptive Cybersecurity—developing security functions that can automatically sense, detect, and respond to access requests, authentication needs, threats from within and outside, and meet regulatory compliance—is one of the ADE tenets. Cyberattacks pose financial, reputational and regulatory risks to businesses, organisations and their customers. Little wonder, then, that security remains high in the priorities of UK businesses. 2019 saw some pretty startling data breaches by cyber criminals:

• Quest Diagnostics – 11.9 million records hacked
• Capital One – 100 million
• Dubsmash – 161.5 million
• Zynga – 218 million
• Moscow’s blockchain voting system was cracked a month before the elections
• Employees connect a Ukrainian nuclear power plant to the internet to mine Bitcoin

Governance

Regulation, legislation, litigation, and reputation are all part of the larger Adaptive Cybersecurity umbrella, too. They’re also words that bring horrifying feelings of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) to any executive, senior manager and auditor. Enterprises of all sizes should adhere to the rules and perform due diligence on all strategic decisions—financial, organisational, technical, and beyond.

DevOps, Agile, and Automation

I have bundled these together because they are closely related and interdependent. Enterprise DevOps—driving continuous improvement by pushing the principles of DevOps to surrounding processes—is another ADE tenet, and automation is at the heart of ADE, enabling businesses to concentrate more on the “where” and “when” of their mission and strategy than on the detailed minutiae and practicalities of “how.”

The principal principle of DevOps is, “Better Value Sooner, Safer, Happier.” And the Agile Manifesto’s four principles are, by now, ubiquitous and well-practised, though not without danger and disappointment if not practised SAFe^®ly. (Pun intended. Other Agile methodologies are available.)

Digital business demands are driving accelerated development expectations with a push to deliver more faster than ever. Agile processes are driving an increased frequency and volume of change to Db2 databases, with a constant din of, “Is it done yet?” Operational performance and availability must continue with attention paid to whether anything else has been disrupted. And all of it is laid at the feet of an ever-depleting, experienced DBA workforce. An automated, resilient solution that embraces DevOps, Agile, and automation can help, providing speed and security to satisfy both Dev and Ops.

Cloud and Everything-as-a-service (XaaS)

Start-ups, subject matter experts (SMEs), and big businesses are all attracted to the cost-, space-, and effort-saving pay-as-you-go model of the cloud. Hand-in-hand with cloud services, the XaaS model is just as convenient and crucial in the eyes of IT leaders and shapers, enabling businesses of all sizes to adopt a better, faster, safer response to customers’ needs.

There are a wide range of services available, including (but not restricted to) Software as a Service (SaaS) apps in the cloud, Platform as a Service (PaaS) for development environments, and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for virtual data centres. XaaS is a critical ADE enabler that delivers tailored, responsive, open (API-type) products controlled by customers and driven by their customers’ requirements.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning

Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) and its integration into processes that work with—not instead of—humans is also integral to ADE, driving better and faster decisions across all business areas to provide predictable and transparent insight into the mainframe environment. If you haven’t got a strategy for AI/ML, you haven’t got a strategy at all.

Conclusion

Data science, IoT, and edge computing are also things to keep your eye on in the future, and indeed the present. BMC has a range of solutions that leverage the emerging technologies covered here, address top IT business concerns, and help evolve your business toward becoming an Autonomous Digital Enterprise.

Contact us for more information.