Quality focus
The development team needs to constantly QA the quality of their work as they go. That means they must spin up test environments on short notice and then tear them back down again. That’s why automation and orchestration are so critical to this group.
If spinning up a test environment requires the team to carve out LUNs, define policies, and work through myriad steps, then cycles slow down. If everything can be automated, then creating tests can be simplified to the point where development owns their footprint and avoids the IT queue.
Take one of our customers—a large technology company—for example. They spin up 1000 VMs every 15 minutes to test new versions of their desktop product, a process they call Constant Integration. As a result, they can test code in a simulated production environment as it is being developed by the engineering team.
Constant Integration is automated through the VMware vCenter API and the Tintri VAAI plug-in (which offloads cloning tasks to Tintri). With this automation in the backend, the customer created a front end console for the development team that they can use to analyze performance without having to contact IT. As a result, DevTest cycles have been shortened from five hours to less than 15 minutes.
Access to infrastructure
A key theme in the above two points is giving developers greater access to infrastructure, which is the driving force behind self-service and why so many providers are touting portals and similar products. But self-service only works when the complexity is abstracted away and actions are automated behind the scenes.
Anyone can leverage Amazon’s APIs to build a skill and allow users to engage their product via the Alexa agent. But if Alexa just reads out data that’s already available on your dashboard, there’s no value-add. The meaningfulness of the interaction is entirely dependent on the underlying product’s ability to provide guidance informed by analytics.
That’s what we’ve tried to show in our latest self-service video: a real use case, where the development team needs to spin up a test environment that requires permission. The underlying product is smart enough to find the decision-maker, simply articulate the impact, recommend optimizations, and then execute the request.