3 Key Objectives for Digital Transformation: Part 2
By: Stuart Milligan
Posted on May, 18 2018 on rest4i.com
Part Index:
Continuous Delivery
In Part 1 of this series of three articles The Right Architecture was covered. Part 2 discusses the primary business objective to Digital Transformation: Continuous Delivery
The last 15 years has seen economic and business dynamics increasing to an unprecedented level. In this modern world flexibility and agility are key to success, and sometimes survival.
RPG Microservices and API’s create in inherent flexibility in delivering mission critical data between all stakeholders. As the operation and code base grows however, governance and management overheads inevitably increase proportionately.
Digital integration also requires artefacts beyond the microservice program or code. Security configurations and API documents (explained in Part 3: Self Service Model of this series) are minimum additional requirements.
With the business more tightly connected to the efficient development and deployment of IT assets than ever before, a structured and automated approach is a necessity.
The multiple stakeholders of regulatory, business, security, developers and IT operations can be linked using DevSecOps technologies. These tools can provide visibility, insight, auditing and automation to support continuous delivery of multiple assets. In a number of scenarios we have worked with an IBM i SCM vendor: Remain Software, who have evolved to offer integrated DevOps solutions. They combine traditional SCM on IBM i with popular distributed DevOps tools such as Jira, Jenkins, GitHub in a single solution. Wim Jongman - CTO at Remain Software, explains that their highest priority demand from their SCM clients, is to link IBM i development with distributed development teams. The pace of mobile development and innovation has put increasing pressure on IBM i software delivery cycles. Promotion and deployment of code automatically, while linking development progress with Agile teams, have become key factors in achieving continuous delivery he maintains.
In the last 2-3 years embedding template driven security with deployment automation, has also become a key aspect for sustaining continuous delivery. Combining best-practice security configuration templates with OpenStack deployment, integrated into Microservice development and IBM i SCM, can shave months off major product/project implementations.
In short: to sustain continuous delivery of modern software requires end-to-end, configurable automation.
Its also important to find the right partner that has not just technical expertise in implementing continuous delivery, but experience in it too. This will help you get started and keep getting better at it from day one.