IBM White paper: modernizing software delivery through software defined environments

AN IBM WHITE PAPER | DECEMBER 2014

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Modernizing Software Delivery through Software- Defined Environments

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Modernizing Software Delivery through Software-Defined Environments

ContentsExecutive Summary .......................2

Five Imperatives for Modernizing the Software Delivery Process ..............3

New, Bold Approach: Software-Defined Environments (SDEs) .........7

Six Key Benefits that SDEs Provide ..8

Three Use Cases for Software-Defined Environments .............................. 10

Transitioning to Software- Defined Environments ................. 12

Software-Defined Environments and IBM’s Role ............................. 15

Conclusion ................................... 17

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Executive Summary

To stay relevant and competitive in business today, companies must respond to their cus-tomers and interact with their customers in ways that were simply inconceivable a decade ago. Mobile, social and cloud applications are enabling businesses to better engage with custom-ers, but these technologies put new pressures on businesses to respond quickly to customer needs and ensure customer satisfaction. Companies must also expedite associated changes to back-office applications.

Cloud technologies and DevOps are helping busi-nesses seize market opportunities with software- driven innovations, but most companies still find it challenging to move high-quality applications into the market at a rapid, market-driven pace. Con-straints inherent in the software delivery life cycle, siloed IT organizations and poor access to test environments create procedural bottlenecks that are costly and inhibit innovation. These barriers are exacerbated when services used by customers must interact with back-end systems.

Companies need a more holistic software delivery process that streamlines their ability to innovate

based on customer feedback while also lowering these barriers, costs and risks. Software-defined environments (SDEs) provide this essential, effi-cient, and comprehensive capability. SDEs extend the value of DevOps to all layers in a platform, enabling companies to conveniently design, deploy and update full stack environments. SDEs enable companies to provision environments quickly and automate manual processes, whether the company is deploying new applications on a cloud, changing or updating a production environment, or mov-ing applications from one cloud to another. All teams can work with the same documents, which improves productivity and collaboration.

Companies can take a variety of steps now to begin the transition to SDEs and make sure their organizations receive the full benefit of these resources and tools.









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Five Imperatives for Modernizing the Software Delivery Process

To become more responsive in today’s highly dynamic and competitive markets, businesses are depending on systems of engagement to facilitate interactions with employees, part-ners and customers. Companies must roll out new builds for these systems at a faster pace than previously and the new applications, once in place, require timely updates. Often, the new applications also require modification to traditional systems of record, such as back-end databases that are used to operate the business.

To gain these more-responsive capabilities, com-panies must make significant improvements to the software delivery process. The following para-graphs characterize five important needs.

Need: Improving the feedback loop between the company and the market

Companies need to continuously use feedback from the market and the development process to make sure they are effectively delivering what the market needs. This requires monitoring an applica-tion during development, testing and production; learning from current customers to determine which applications and services are working or not; identifying market trends or competitors’ offerings that might impact the company’s business; and responding quickly with appropriate modifications or new services.









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Need: Streamlining software delivery to accelerate innovation

Companies need to get away from manual and bureaucratic processes and streamline the software delivery pipeline so they can make experimenta-tion easier and less risky. Experimentation is nec-essary for innovation and product differentiation and making sure that apps always resonate with the customer base. Companies need a process that enables them to efficiently experiment with different channels, including mobile or web-based services, and then improve and grow that new service for the market. They also need the ability to recover quickly if experiments don’t work or if there is a problem with a new product.

Need: Expediting software delivery for complex, multiplatform systems

Businesses are increasingly deploying customer applications on public clouds to improve cus-tomer engagement, responsiveness and business agility. Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions are very effective in this con-text because customer- facing services often have short life spans in the market or require frequent changes or updates. But consumer apps often need to make use of longer-lived,

mission- critical services and data that reside in the company’s on-premise data centers and mainframes. As the consumer applications change and evolve, companies must have the capability to make appropriate modifications to the on- premises services.

Companies often use hybrid clouds to integrate deployments across public cloud and on-premise services, but companies still need to accelerate software delivery in hybrid environments and they still need to efficiently enable their systems of engagement to interact with their systems of record. Companies need the two systems to work together to provide an effective user experience from front-end to back-end services.

Need: Convenient, on-demand access to infrastructure test environments

Organizations have ongoing difficulties getting access to infrastructure for testing. A new applica-tion typically requires separate environments for development, quality assurance, and production

Companies need to continuously use feedback from the market and the development process to make sure they are effectively delivering what the market needs.









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as well as systems integration and other process-es. Teams also need access to environments on demand. Today, teams in most enterprises must request a test environment and wait for it to be allo-cated, installed and scheduled. The delays increase costs and risks and inhibit experimentation.

Teams also need better access to infrastructure so they can perform integration testing early in the cycle to expedite the discovery and resolution of defects. This testing strategy, called “shift left test-ing,” can eliminate the frequent need for late-stage revisions that add time and risks to a project. Com-panies also typically have multiple releases they want to test in parallel to reduce cycle time and costs. They must have on-demand access to envi-ronments and the ability to share environments across teams to support these parallel projects.

Need: DevOps tools that unify software delivery for all layers of the stack

DevOps is an enterprise capability for continu-ous software delivery that enables companies to obtain feedback from the market and quickly deliver changes to users. DevOps makes it practical to pursue small batch changes or scale new deployments. It makes

experimentation easier and less risky. It also has a cultural impact on organizations because it enables better collaboration across organizational silos, which in turn helps drive productivity and output.

To date, enterprises have typically employed DevOps to automate the development of software changes and updates that are deployed and used at the application layer of the stack. Aside from large web-scale cloud services companies, most enter-prises have not used DevOps to manage infrastruc-ture as part of the application. Most enterprises still employ hands-on, manual processes for infrastruc-ture changes whether they are using traditional infrastructure or virtualized solutions. As a result, it can take weeks to accomplish a simple task, such as adjusting a network setting. Standing up a new cloud services environment is also a hands-on pro-cess that can take many weeks to complete.

The procedural and time-to-market discrepancies created by the separate approaches can create fric-tion if small or incremental changes to an applica-

Teams need access to environments on demand and the ability to share environments across teams to support parallel projects. They also need be"er access to infrastructure so they can perform integration testing early in the cycle to expedite the discovery and resolution of defects.









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tion require changes to the underlying infrastruc-ture. Companies also need DevOps tools that can manage all changes at all layers in the stack in a consistent way. This capability will not only allevi-ate the friction between application and infrastruc-ture changes, it will also expedite the promotion of all new changes to the production environment.

Companies need DevOps tools that can manage all changes at all layers in the stack in a consistent way.









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New, Bold Approach: Software-Defined Environments (SDEs)

Companies can now use specialized DevOps tools to create software-defined environ-ments (SDEs) that solve the software delivery challenges described previously.

What is a software-defined environment? It is a collection of documents that can be programmati-cally executed to create software and infrastructure resources and automate their deployment. The SDE functions as a blueprint that describes and coordi-nates all of the components needed for a particular implementation. A SDE makes it possible to pro-vision all of an environment’s compute, network and storage components with the press of a single button, and then use the environment to deploy a multi- tier application.









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Six Key Benefits that SDEs Provide

SDEs revolutionize software delivery for com-panies because the tools streamline access to infrastructure and unify and automate the soft-ware delivery process for both application and infrastructure changes.

Following are six key benefits that SDEs provide:

Benefit: Immediate access to infrastructure

Because teams can now stand up a full stack with a single request, they can now have access to the infrastructure they need when they need it. Previ-ously, it would take three to 10 weeks to get access to an environment for a project.

Benefit: Unified tools and processes enable development at any layer

A SDE makes it easier to manage development for applications and the full stack because it enables companies to use unified tools and pro-cesses, established by a blueprint document, for development at any layer. Furthermore, an appli-cation and all of the servers, middleware, and other resources that the application runs on are managed as a set of version- controlled artifacts. The SDE manages and tracks software versions through the entire software delivery process, providing consistent, automated techniques for promoting software from development through testing and into production.









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Benefit: All teams work with the same documents

SDEs facilitate a fundamental shift in how compa-nies should view their applications and the testing process because the tools enable developers, inte-grators and specialists to work with the same doc-uments. SDEs eliminate the barrier between appli-cation changes and infrastructure changes that has prevented efficient software delivery in traditional processes. Now, when a change to an application requires a change to the underlying infrastructure, the changes can be managed in the same way.

Benefit: SDEs treat applications and infrastructure holistically

When SDEs are used, infrastructure becomes part of the application. All levels in the stack are defined in code and delivered on demand. This capability revolutionizes the process of configuring compute, storage, server and network components and facilitates the transformation to software-defined networking. It enables companies to build their own PaaS offerings, where infrastructure, compo-nents and applications are defined. Development teams can then use the PaaS offering to deliver the software innovations they need quickly and with the functionality they require while compressing time to market.

Benefit: SDEs are portable

SDEs are portable. Once designed, a SDE can be deployed into any compatible cloud. The tech-niques it establishes will be consistent whether deployed into an IaaS or PaaS platform and wheth-er the applications are used for systems of engage-ment or systems of record.

Benefit: SDEs expedite delivery of multiplatform applications

SDEs help enterprises that are struggling to effi-ciently deliver multiplatform applications because the technology enables systems of engagement to interact with systems of record. In these cases companies need to consider solutions and offer-ings that can help them deliver cloud environ-ments faster and also help with the deployment of applications for mainframe, web and mobile envi-ronments. SDEs help organizations deliver multi-platform applications faster.









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Three Use Cases for Software-Defined Environments

The typical use cases for SDEs include deploy-ing new applications on a cloud, changing or updating an environment that is already in production and moving applications from one cloud to another.

Use Case: Deploying new applications

Companies today must have the ability to quickly deploy new, high-quality applications in response to customer feedback and market conditions.

A SDE makes it possible for a single button press to stand up a full stack on demand, within a matter of minutes. This capability is a game-changer from project development and time-to-market per-spectives because a company can now realistically complete the software delivery process in as little as one month.

Use Case: Delivering changes and updates

Companies frequently need to change or update environments that are already in production. SDEs offer significant conveniences and advantages in these use cases.

Previously, an organization would need to tear down an environment and create a new one to make a software change, but SDEs now enable the organization to introduce changes easily. A SDE can be used if the development team wants to make a radical change in an existing application that is in the market. A SDE can be used if the development team wants to experiment with new innovations for an existing application and needs to expand an existing test environment temporarily for this work. A SDE is also helpful for solving unusual issues in production environments. For example, if a soft-ware vendor gets a bug report for certain customer









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applications that operate on its cloud, the company can use a SDE to quickly spin up a test sandbox and test various solutions.

Use Case: Moving applications

Companies have increasing needs to move applications from one cloud to another and they especially want this capability to future-proof their solutions in case their infrastructure options or business requirements change. They need cloud- agnostic, full-stack environments that can be moved to different clouds. SDEs give organiza-tions this flexibility.

A SDE enables several use cases for moving applica-tions. For example, an enterprise might have sub-stantial physical infrastructure but it might decide to pursue several types of cloud projects. It might decide to use its internal cloud for one application and a public cloud for another. SDEs give the organi-zation flexibility to work in either environment.

Companies often need to move applications from public to private clouds. For example, many com-panies find it practical to deploy a new application on a public cloud and move the application to their in-house private cloud later, after they’ve observed its usage in the market and identified their infra-structure needs. Companies often want to use a public cloud for application development and test-

ing and then run the commercial product in-house on a private cloud. Often, a startup prefers to rent infrastructure during its growth phase until it can build its own infrastructure. In these types of cases the organization needs to stand up the full environ-ment on public cloud and then stand up the same environment on an in-house private cloud; they want to make the transition smoothly and quickly. A SDE enables them to achieve this.









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Transitioning to Software- Defined Environments

Some companies will transition to SDEs faster than others but all companies should get start-ed now to begin learning about SDEs and full-stack engineering.

In today’s business context, every enterprise must become more responsive to its customers and mar-kets. Every enterprise must also compete against “garage entrepreneurs” and innovators that might disrupt their businesses. Companies should not wait until there is an immediate market need, a new competitive threat or declining sales to begin the shift to SDEs.

From an IT perspective, organizations have many reasons to begin transitioning to SDEs now. More and more companies want to use cloud services for application development and SDEs efficiently enable this. If companies have already automated application delivery they might feel the lack of test environments more acutely and want to get start-ed. For these firms, the need for environments is a significant pain point that provides a motivation and justification for using this approach now.

Some companies will transition to SDEs faster than others but all companies should get started now to begin learning about SDEs and full-stack engineering. Companies should not wait until there is an immediate market need, a new competitive threat or declining sales to begin the shift to SDE.









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Take Steps Now to Transition to SDEs

Companies can take a variety of steps now to begin the transition to SDEs.

Step 1: Think “small”

One practical approach is to adopt a small-batch mentality. Start with software projects that are small in size, scope or business impact and that offer some flexibility in how the project is pursued, managed and deployed. These can be new projects or updates to existing environments. Another approach is to incrementally use a SDE for different layers of the stack. Start by automating the application layer and then begin automating the lower levels of the stack.

Step 2: Encourage operations to adopt SDEs

Operations teams are becoming increasingly inter-ested in cloud and SDE solutions. They can make an impact by using a SDE to drive the entire stack. They can also use SDEs to expand their roles if lines of business within their companies begin looking outside the organization for new, faster ways to respond to customer needs. Operations teams should view these situations as opportunities to step in and help with a SDE.

Step 3: Prepare for SDE impacts on IT, people and skills

As a DevOps approach, SDEs bring IT develop-ment and operations groups together to improve business collaboration and efficiencies and reduce IT costs and risks. But these groups do need to buy into the approach, actively support and par-ticipate in the SDE. They need to work together to make it succeed.

SDEs will create a need in the organization for new skills. People working on projects must be able to think in terms of both the underlying infrastruc-ture as well as the applications. A team must have people who have the skill sets to manage clouds as well as skills to define a full-stack environment. SDEs can also lead to new roles in the organiza-tion. For example, companies are beginning to hire DevOps engineers, or full-stack engineers, who understand code and can program infrastructure. SDEs are an enabling tool for these roles and will help engineers transition into these positions.

Step 4: Establish guidelines to ensure appropriate use

Because SDEs make it less costly to spin out infra-structure, companies do need to pay attention to make sure they use SDEs appropriately. Compa-nies might be concerned that people will spin up









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infrastructure but not spin it down after they’ve concluded a project, which can drive unnecessary costs and defeat the pay-as-you-go benefit of using cloud resources. But this can be managed with automation. For example, cloud resources can be purchased according to a predefined leasing arrangement that requires periodic renewals. If not renewed, the resource will be reclaimed and costs to the business will cease.

Organizations may want to employ some oversight of cloud usage to ensure appropriate use, but they may not want to assert so much oversight that the team loses agility. “Trust but verify” is one model companies can use to ensure teams have flexibility to use resources and promote efficient use. Bud-geting usage is another practical approach. Give employees ability to charge their usage on the cor-porate account, within a specified budgetary limit.

Step 5: Consider cloud licensing and pricing implications

The introduction of SDEs is likely to impact the business model for cloud consumption. Cloud licensing and pricing metrics will need to evolve to reflect how businesses are actually using cloud resources. For example, with full-stack engineer-ing, environments are spun up and down as they are needed, so environments can be short lived. Companies will need a pricing metric that consid-ers this type of transient usage. A “monthly man-aged instance hours” approach (which IBM has adopted for UrbanCode Deploy with Patterns), can account for transient usage to make sure compa-nies are not paying for more resources than they actually consume.

A SDE brings IT development and operations groups together to improve business collaboration and efficiencies and reduce IT costs and risks. But these groups do need to buy into the approach, actively support and participate in the SDE. They need to work together to make it succeed.









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Software-Defined Environments and IBM’s Role

Software-defined environments and full-stack engineering capabilities are fundamental to IBM’s strategy to support companies that use software to interact with their customers. IBM’s solution for SDEs and full-stack engineering is designed to give web companies as well as tradi-tional enterprises new tools to innovate and move in the market with the agility of garage-based entrepreneurs while reducing costs and risks. The solution, IBM UrbanCode Deploy with Patterns, highlights the following:

◆ Pattern designer—This is a template that can be used to design an open, full-stack application environment in a diagram or textual editor

◆ Design once, deploy anywhere capability—Once a full-stack pattern is designed it can be deployed on clouds

from Amazon, SoftLayer, or VMware, among others, or on any OpenStack cloud

◆ Environment lifecycle management— A pattern can be used not only to stand up full stack, but to also update or change production environments and manage the changes

◆ Delivery process automation—A pattern can be used with an automation engine for integrated full-stack environments to elimi-nate manual processes

A strategic aspect of UrbanCode Deploy with Pat-terns is its cross-domain capability, which enables its use in a variety of cloud environments. As part of IBM’s UrbanCode solutions portfolio, UrbanCode Deploy with Patterns complements IBM’s overall capabilities in cloud computing. It can be used to









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deploy applications to PaaS environments based on IBM’s Bluemix, for example.

Customer experience with UrbanCode Deploy with Patterns is yielding direction to IBM for further advancing the capabilities of software-defined environments and full-stack engineering. Two anticipated approaches based on this experience will introduce capabilities to enforce operational policies and provide techniques for automated cost optimization.

For example, companies have expressed interest in using SDEs and full-stack engineering to reduce the need for active enforcement of rules and gover-nance policies. They want to define the rules and let the system monitor usage and conditions to ensure adherence and compliance. This is a prac-tical capability that can be integrated into Urban-Code Deploy with Patterns.

Companies have also expressed a need to auto-mate provisioning decisions based on cost and performance of available cloud environments and a company’s particular business strategy or tech-nology considerations. If one cloud is less costly to deploy than another, or one cloud has performance constraints that another doesn’t have, automa-tion capability can be added to streamline these processes and decisions. This is another practical capability that can be integrated into UrbanCode Deploy with Patterns.









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Conclusion

The corporate enterprise today has a pressing need to understand customer sentiments and quickly respond with end-user applications that ensure customer satisfaction. Organizations also need better capability to expedite changes to back-office applications. Software-defined environments will solve these and other pressing needs by automating and simplifying the software delivery process.

SDEs dramatically accelerate the delivery of cloud-enabled applications by enabling users to design, deploy, and update full-stack environ-ments for multiple clouds. Teams can provision environments quickly, automate manual process-es and eliminate procedural bottlenecks. SDEs reduce errors and rework and enable teams to share environments to improve collaboration and productivity. Overall, companies that adopt SDEs become more agile and innovative at reduced cost and risk. They gain the capability to deliver high-quality applications to the market in very short timeframes to target new opportunities and offset competitive threats.

Learn More

IBM looks forward to helping enterprises transi-tion to software-defined environments. For more information about IBM’s UrbanCode Deploy with Patterns solution, please visit http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/ucdep-patterns

http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/ucdep-patterns

http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/ucdep-patterns