ABOUT THE WEBINAR
Forrester has named 2018 the year of Enterprise DevOps. While 2017 was a year when many companies started with DevOps and Microservices, in 2018 both are becoming mainstream and changing the way we do IT and the way we build systems. Productivity is improving drastically, whereby small business-oriented teams are able to build wonderful new IT components in a shorter time, and then deploy, monitor, and improve them afterwards.
It is the continued increased level of automation in IT that enables DevOps and Microservices, and all together we see a much better alignment between IT and business units in the future, where the business owns DevOps teams that own autonomous components.
In this webinar, Andreas will go through how all these parts fit together, and how we see Microservice Systems being designed are ready to take over the core enterprise application space.
QUESTIONS & ANSWERS
How is Mendix looking to support multiple services/containers in the administration or application console?
This is something we’re currently working on that with our customer PostNL. We have found that we need an app and landscape management as well as joint monitoring. In the near future, you will be able to group different microservices or apps into groups together into a system. This means that you can manage and view them as a group in the Project Explorer.
There will also be a continuous integration test orchestration template that you can use to build several steps and run a test orchestration process that can initiate Unit Test Module, ATS, or another automated testing, and collect the results afterwards. We are also developing a feature that can deploy several microservices together. For example, to ensure deployments are correct and all microservices are functioning, you can deploy multiple microservices and call a functional health check automatically. For large customers it can make sense to own this functionality by building apps in Mendix that can do this orchestration and control through the published APIs. That way the sky is the limit - you can build as much automation and management as makes sense for your specific project.
Through the distributed/diverse teams you mentioned for BizDevOps, how do you ensure consistency, quality, governance, and delivery timing across all the business units (and in turn delivery), or do they operate autonomously?
Teams should be as self-organizing as possible, but it does not make sense to remove the entire middle and central layers of an IT organization. The focus goes from as much control as possible to as little control as possible, while still ensuring the organization works well together. Some technology choices could be made, like Use MS Word for documents or Use Mendix to build new systems and for legacy migration if possible. Instructions should be minimal but helpful.
Business units should be as independent as possible, so that it becomes more about enabling and collaborating or supporting, rather than governance with strict rules and control. But we still see a need for an enterprise level, a program level, and a product level. This could be referred to as Organized and Collaborative BizDevOps.
View more webinars on-demand at developers.mendix.com.