Enterprise DevOps and Plutora

Plutora Optimizes Value Stream Flow and Scales DevOps Adoption

Adoption of DevOps practices in large enterprises starts in pockets of the organization and can struggle to proliferate across all parts. Plutora helps scale DevOps across organizations. As large enterprises adopt DevOps principles, the practices typically start in a small number of dispersed teams and it takes time and effort to spread the ways of working across the organization. Plutora accelerates DevOps adoption at enterprise scale by automating visibility into the enterprise’s value streams. Integrating value streams’ tooling expands each tool’s value by connecting it to the value delivery process. This converged toolchain then accelerates the delivery of value into customers’ hands. Management and orchestration standardize the process and analytics on top of a common data model which provides insights for value-based improvements during the DevOps journey.

Enterprises need to drive digital transformation by adopting agile and DevOps ways of working or risk being left behind by disruption. Command and control, bureaucratic cultures, compliance challenges and monolithic, legacy architectures are typically hindering factors of adoption. Plutora facilitates DevOps adoption at enterprise scale providing the business with a “catwalk over the factory floor”, coordinating teams from ideation to value realization by integrating into existing toolchains and by providing a management and orchestration layer on top of those tools. Including cloud-based analytics enables a system of continuous improvement by answering the most important question of transformation: “Are we improving?”

Problems in Scaling DevOps

The goal of DevOps is to deliver better value outcomes faster and more safely by unifying activities and (development and operations) teams across end-to-end value streams (products or services). This is achieved through improved collaboration, often through small, multi-functional, autonomous teams, working in small increments and automating manual tasks.

Enterprises face unique challenges not found in smaller companies including tightly coupled architectures, tightly integrated COTS, large and diverse portfolios of applications – many of which have been built many years ago or acquired. These systems are supported by both internal and external resources who are frequently geographically dispersed. While internal teams can mandate a development methodology, external teams integrate code in a series of stages, or route-to-live (RtL), including integration, staging and finally production. These delivery stages create extra problems such as coordinating and managing test environments at scale. Each environment instance is complex with an inconsistent mix of technologies, servers, middleware, databases and communication layers so test and staging environments are rarely production-like, which means that testing can’t be trusted and the live environment is unpredictable.

As development teams adopt agile methods, it places increasing pressure on already constrained IT operations resources, shared environments and test data. The enterprise is already stressed with a high degree of dependencies as projects must move in concert with each other to deliver value to the business. Whilst enterprises must tackle these dependencies by breaking them and moving towards loosely coupled organizational and system architectures, this takes time, and making changes with the intention of improvement can carry risk of failure. Failures in production carry significant potential financial, legal and customer perception risks so enterprise teams need to find ways to experiment and test changes early and assure they operate as intended when they reach the live environments. They need ways to mitigate the risk to production and to learn from the wisdom of production.

DevOps at Scale with Plutora

Plutora enables organizations to transition from project centric, large batch ways of working to value stream oriented, incremental ways of working. By correlating data from existing DevOps toolchains combined with modules to manage releases, test environments, and deployment activities, Plutora evolves the continuous delivery process. The orchestration of automated and manual software release pipelines provides a single view of releases and associated flow metrics allowing teams to inspect the performance of their value stream, identify constraints and adapt to make improvements accordingly.

Plutora enables DevOps at scale by making it possible to add governance to any pipeline, sharing responsibility between development and IT operations regardless of development methodology, technology stack or the service transition process required. Geography, vendor involvement, technology stack, heritage portfolio, on-premise vs cloud and code ownership are made transparent by having connections to each relevant system and a robust orchestration and collaboration engine.

Shared test environments are managed in a single location with full information regarding application impact, schedules and coordination with release pipelines. Quality information is continuously available for both manual and automated testing and also for both functional and non-functional testing. The entire dataset is combined into a cloud-based analytics engine for complete insights into the entire process from idea to value realization that drive ongoing improvements during the enterprise’s DevOps transformation and help the teams reduce risk of failure as they transition to new ways of working.