Friday, February 26, 2016

Tech Musing 2


Summary
Docker is a company that has become popular among developers by making containers easier to access and use during application development. It is now making strides to becoming a stronger DevOps enterprise by focusing on the value of the operations side of containers. Earlier this week, Docker announced the new Docker Datacenter (DDC), which is an on-site platform for both agile development and management. This solution will provide IT developers with an environment to create and deploy applications on their own.  The DDC platform contains three different aspects that help improve lifecycle management of applications, as well as improved security, orchestration, and container runtime. To help enhance the understanding and management of applications, a graphical user interface (GUI) has been provided. In terms of security, a multitude of new features have been released, including security of container runtimes. Docker prides itself on its flexibility, as “Dockerized” apps can be operated on any infrastructure and depends only on a Linux kernel. The DDC can also be run on cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure, further solidifying its flexibility.  Overall, the new DDC will provide IT professionals with improved tools to help manage its applications, which should convince other administrators to adopt Docker’s services.

Relevance
In class, we had a guest speaker named Nicole Forsgren talk to us about DevOps. She explained that DevOps built off of agile development principles to embrace a new methodology that revolves around improved communication between software developers and operations personnel. Adoption of this movement requires a top-down cultural commitment, in which successful implementation should result in a quicker and more reliable release of software. She talked about how many companies were hesitant to commit on a DevOps deployment because of how much time and effort needs to be committed to the practice. The above article shows how Docker is recognizing the benefit of being a leader in DevOps and how the company envisions the new commitment to operations will help their services be used by more organizations.

Importance
It is important for MIS professionals to know and understand DevOps because this movement is only gaining traction. More and more organizations are realizing that DevOps is a great way to improve software development, as evidenced by the success of companies like Flickr. Through adopting DevOps, Flickr was able to meet a requirement of ten deployments per day. The idea of continuous deployment has helped companies operate in a leaner manner. Finally companies are realizing that the waterfall model is not the best choice and that strategies built off of agile methodologies will help increase communication, efficiency, reliability, and security.

1 comment:

  1. Really liked this article. Thanks for sharing it. Not sure it's a DevOps solution as much as a SAAS solution. Still, it's interesting to see how they are moving to new platforms.

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