Cloud Luminaries: Victoria Livschitz on Using Automation to Achieve Developer Self-Service

[This article was written by David Spark.]

"The complete computing system emerges in response to a business need," said Victoria Livschitz (@vlivschitz), CEO ofQubell, of her company’s mission statement.

We’re undergoing an enormous pace of innovation where software is transforming the world in a way we've never seen before. A CIO’s number one fear is how quickly their industry changes. Much of that is happening thanks to DevOps workflows that are hyper reactive to Software Development Life Cycles (SDLCs), explained Livschitz.

In order to deploy a continuous DevOps workflow, you will need to create a series of automation processes. Those will be defined by an understanding between the creator and the user of the automation tool, explained Livschitz in her presentation “Purpose-Defined Computing: The Next Frontier of Automation” at the 2014 Cloud Expo in Santa Clara, California.

“Think about button makers and button users,” said Livschitz. “It's not about giving them tools, but rather creating self-service interfaces.”

Deployment may not be the problem. The real problem may be a configuration change management problem, said Livschitz. If you can automate that process, by understanding the issues of users and creators, then you can solve a major SDLC workflow problem.

Livschitz outlined the three magic buttons every organization needs to create.

• Launch button: This button will produce a working instance of an application, and will be part of constructing that environment.
• Destroy button: Environments can't sprawl uncontrollably, nor can they live forever. Destruction of applications are sadly an afterthought, but all tools once launched will eventually die. Upon provisioning you must also think about deprovisioning.
• Reconfigure button: The job of this button is to take a system from its current state to a new state. This could involve updating the index, patching the OS, or upgrading the schema.

There are more automation buttons you can create, but Livschitz warns that it’s better to have a fewer number of well working buttons, than lots of buttons that are not that reliable.