In our industry’s attempts to follow best practices that marketers assure us we must have or we are going to lose to our biggest competitor … No, wait, we’ll lose to that startup no one ever heard of … No, hold on, we’ll lose to foreign competition … No, wait … (okay, I’ll stop. You get the picture), many of us have gotten completely unreasonable in our IT approaches.
Like asking a vendor, “Where can I run your application?” Well, the more “where” options the better, because every organization has different needs. But a vendor has to start somewhere, and you can tell when they get to a certain size because they don’t want to talk about it. “We’re SaaS,” was the en vogue thing to say six months ago; now we’re back to “containers” or even “cloud,” thanks to a whole slew of cloud-first offerings out there. But what all of these vendors really need to be able to say (and a disappointingly small number of them actually can) is, “We run on containers, so we don’t have to care where you deploy us.”
Those are the types of scenarios that forward-looking enterprises need to start anticipating—the broadest, easiest-to-implement, longest-lasting solutions that can be found. The days of “devs picked this DB no one ever heard of because it was 0.0000001 microseconds faster on a hundred-line query,” need to be gone. Standardize on highly usable tools across the DevOps toolchain from libraries approved for use in apps to deployment technology.
A big part of this approach right now is my pretty common refrain: Advanced automation. The more a system can do, the more time staff has to do other important things. All forms of testing are finally within our grasp because of advanced automation technology ranging from Kubernetes programmability and controllers to ‘AI’ filtering of results (Side note: What most IT folks currently call AI is not; we need to stop calling it that and give it a more accurate name. Machine learning is better; advanced automation is more to the point, IMO). But whatever you call it, it enables massive pre-release testing. From functional to security, it offers the ability to make these tests useful by speeding up testing and results processing so staff need only look at issues considered critical. No one cares where the test engine runs, just that it can run tests wherever the application resides.
The same is true for a whole lot of other ‘whats.’ Vulnerabilities are probably the best example. Tools are starting to look for them in an automated fashion. Very few organizations have a comprehensive list of which vulnerability databases a tool must support. Any given organization might have one or two databases in their list, but most just require that the functionality be available.
So don’t get bogged down in the details, and don’t select five different tools to do the same job on five different teams. Start standardizing again. Oh, standardization won’t last when something evolutionary comes along in the space, but it will leave you less clutter to clean up and more specific expertise in-house.
And that leaves you more time to keep wowing the business. Keep those systems running smoothly and keep cranking out more useful stuff for the organization. Most orgs show their appreciation these days, but some still do not. In those cases, we thank you for them. We know what you’re going through—we are going through it, too, and yet the lights are still on. Keep rocking it.