Software Delivery Management for What Ails CI/CD – InApps 2022

CloudBees sponsored this podcast.

Brian Dawson, director of product marketing for CloudBees, certainly knows a lot about silos, and especially, how to remove them in support of a healthy DevOps culture and a well-oiled CI/CD pipeline. During the past 30 years of his career, he’s also obviously seen the adoption of many tools and processes. But, unfortunately, new and powerful tools have traditionally created more barriers to constant and intense collaboration for CI/CD. The problem has certainly been compounded by the explosion in choice of open source tools, especially for cloud native deployments.

In this episode of InApps Makers podcast, TNS publisher Alex Williams speaks with Dawson to learn more about software development management (SDM).

Software Delivery Management for What Ails CI/CD

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“With each new development, there’s always a risk that as a new technology a new language comes in, that it becomes yet another silo,” Dawson said.

Much friction among often siloed DevOps teams is also transferred to CI/CD as organizations go “left to right..as the industry has been focused on automating, aligning and shifting from project to product so we operate cross-functionally across what are traditional organizational silos from commit to deploy,” Dawson said.

As a way to solve these organizational DevOps and CI/CD challenges, the concept of software delivery management (SDM) has been garnering a lot of attention — and which is also the main subject of this InApps Makers podcast with Dawson as the guest. Part DevOps and CI/CD; SDM, which has a foundation in GitOps, serves as a way to support faster and more robust testing and deployment cycles. It also helps to solve some of the organizational structure issues outlined above.

“We know that what we need to do to be able to align across existing teams and organizational silos such that we are all focused on delivering quality software rapidly, repeatedly and reliably,” Dawson said. “We have to get people to work together and part of getting those people to work together is ensuring that that we are able to either use a common set of tools or connect the language, the data and the information across those tools so we kind of have cohesive flow, i.e. as we move from dev to QA to operations, and ultimately out to the customer.”

While CI/CD and DevOps certainly have helped to reduce frictions between DevOps teams as they go “left to right,” SDM largely can offer what’s been missing within the industry from “top to bottom,” Dawson said.

“Reduced lead times, increased frequency of deployment, lower change failure rate and faster time to recover: But now our challenge is — and what a SDM strategy will help organizations with — is scaling that across your business,” Dawson said.

And while SDM is now considered necessary “to be successful in business with software ” by CloudBees, as well as by analysts and competitors, CloudBees is developing the CloudBees Solution for Software Delivery Management to help organizations implement SDM and, of course, to help support its Jenkins X and other development tools.

Additionally, a core part of the SDM platform will how it can “establish a unified system of record,” or a common data model, which will consist of a datastore. The datastore will, among other things,  create a foundation for ML and represents the backend for GitOps.

The resulting “application framework will allow your existing tools, across your various software teams and business teams to extend your datastore… and integrate it into a larger sort of [control plane] of the SDM platform,” Dawson said.

Feature image from Pixabay.