The Doppler Quarterly Special Edition 2019 | Page 64

KEY CONCEPT
DevOps
"A culture shift or a movement that encourages great
communication and collaboration to foster building better
quality software more quickly with more reliability."
and money it took to procure or create new environments to try out experiments or a
hypothesis. Many enterprises outlawed experimenting with new technologies without
going through a proper vetting process. This mindset often stifled innovation. I have
interviewed clients who have told me they stopped trying out new ideas because it was
so painful to go through the processes, or because it was discouraged due to perceived
risks. Employees would experiment at home but could not bring these learnings to work.
Stifling innovation often leads to employee turnover because the best and the brightest
love to innovate.
In the pre-cloud days, embracing new technologies was a lot harder than it is today. For
example, let’s say an engineer determines that for a particular workload, a non-rela-
tional database like Hadoop is a better solution than the existing Oracle relational data-
base that he or she is forced to use. The engineer would have to go through a committee
to get approval to bring in a new vendor. Hardware and software licenses would have to
be procured. People would have to be trained or hired to manage and maintain this new
technology, and so on. All of this takes weeks or months to discuss, plan and execute,
which almost always exceeds the time that the engineer has to complete the task. After
going through this process once or twice to no avail, the engineer will not even bother
to bring up new solutions anymore.
In the cloud, databases like Hadoop are available as a managed service with a simple API
call. No hardware or licenses to procure, no army of people to manage and maintain, and
very little time and money needed to experiment. If allowed, the engineer could test his
or her hypothesis the same day without involving any other people. If the experiment
proved that Hadoop was indeed the best solution for the specific workload, then the
engineer could work with others to make it an official solution for the enterprise. In order
62 | THE DOPPLER | SPECIAL EDITION 2019