How to bridge the IT management gap between operations and development?
The problem is that, even though it seems like it should be easy, it really is a hard problem to solve. I have seen only two companies even come close in my 30 years –
Also, you hear things like, “They do not know how to run our applications” from the dev guys. The traditional ops guys typically don’t know any of the lexicon of the developers when they talk about code management and build processes. To ops guys,
these terms are place holders for long nights and weekends. The dev guys are usually too busy to hand-hold the ops guys and never give them the proper tools and documentation to manage the applications. Years ago, IBM/Tivoli created a DMTF specification called
AMS that was all about automating this hand off process. The developers could fill in the blanks during their development process, and generated XML would get pushed so that the IT management tool could intelligently manage the application.
The ControlTier guys have built a fantastic tool for application developers enabling them to automate the tasks required to get an application into operations, but they are still Desperately-Seeking-Susan on how to also integrate ops guys into that discussion
In a small way, I am helping them define and bridge the Dev2Ops gap (the theory being I am smart at Ops and they are real smart at Dev). Their recent
ControlTier product line. What they have done is separate out and improve this framework code as a stand alone open source control dispatching framework. They have also made it user friendly for operations. I am trying to add some feedback by seeing if I can