Agile or Fragile

At a recent DevOps presentation by Gene Kim I was reminded of some startling facts on what differentiates high performing IT organisations from everyone else.

High performing  IT organisations do not have code freezes, in fact they make more changes during the periods that would otherwise be code freeze periods.  This seems counter intuitive, how is this even possible?   A code freeze typically occurs at peak periods of customer activity and hence no one wants to make changes which might upset the running of live applications.   Sounds sensible but what it really means is that just at the very time when changes could have the most beneficial impact you don’t make them because of a more fundamental issue, you are not able to make changes safely, in other words your code release process is fragile.

Agile development advocates that you can make changes frequently, but for that you must be able to make changes safe in the knowledge that these changes will not regress the functionality or performance of live applications.  High frequency changes also means you can experiment and prove the value of alternative solutions in production, testing not the stability of the change but the suitability of the change.

Agile development teams don’t measure releases per year but deployments per day.  A deployment is any change to any component of the application, environment or infrastructure.  Which reminds me of another startling observation, another top predictor of IT performance is “version control for all production artifacts”.  We all know that there are just as many configuration changes as there are source code changes and version control allows you to provision, compare and debug holistically.   The first question anyone asks when something breaks is “what changed?” which is relatively easy to answer for source code using source code control but is usually difficult and time consuming to answer for everything else.

So how does Delphix virtual data help with agile development?  A key to implementing agile development is making environments available early in the development cycle.  For database based applications that means provisioning a full read write copy of the database for every developer, tester and batch test activity.   A de-sensitised copy of the production database is a crucial artifact in the set of components which make up a non-production clone environment.  For most customers this is just not feasible, but with Delphix full database copies can be version controlled, can be versioned in seconds and can be provisioned or switched between versions in minutes.  Delphix allows you to manipulate and control databases versions as quickly and easily as source code files.

The example below shows how Delphix allows developers to submit regression tests on demand by automating and accelerating the data provisioning process in line with automated test suites.  Making environments available early in the development lifecycle allows a developer to get fast feedback on the success and implications of his or her proposed change.  You also get better value from your test environments as a greater ratio of time is spent running tests rather than preparing to run tests.

With more tests run more frequently and earlier in the cycle, the net result is that problems are discovered early and fixed more quickly, as illustrated below.

Virtual databases are a key enabler to Agile Development, allowing IT to produce higher quality releases, faster.  Be Agile not Fragile.