The Agile Penguinz – Blending DevOps

The IBM LinuxONE Emperor and Rockhopper Penguins Go to Work

A lifetime ago, I was a VM developer anxious to make my mark on the programming world by producing leading-edge applications that I thought surely everyone would scramble to use and share.  At the time, it was imperative to establish a good rapport with IT in order to complete the deployment cycle and get anyone’s attention.  Even back then, there was a constant battle between my team – with rapid development of apps – and operations (aka data center IT).  There were definitely different mindsets – with app development we dealt with dynamic business processes and rapid change-driven delivery, while IT operations focused on reliability, mission-critical workloads, and intense fiscal scrutiny.  And it was frustrating to me with fighting the notion that change is complex, slow and expensive.

Of course, that was a long time ago, but we still see these internal battles occurring in businesses today across industries, as the struggles to meet changing business demands and reduce time to market continue.  The common tools provided by SUSE help transform those battlegrounds into collaborative environments needed to move forward.

One year ago this month, IBM delivered two “Linux-your-way” mainframes under the IBM LinuxONE brand.  These new offerings provide a great platform for SUSE to deliver a stack of tools and applications targeted at blending the different mind sets of Development and Operations and allowing businesses to:

• Reduce time to market by providing quick and easy access to developers – for building prototypes and experimenting with new technologies, so they can build and deliver the right product through fast experimentation
• Improve efficiency of the DevOps organization – through the automation and orchestration of IT processes to ensure continuous integration/continuous delivery repeatability, consistency and velocity to corporate IT and security standards, treating infrastructure as code
• Meet changing business demands – by implementing and leveraging new architectures (e.g. cloud, storage) and open source technologies (e.g. containers) enabling delivery of IT services on demand in support of your DevOps process

The IBM LinuxONE with SUSE Linux platform provides a compelling collaborative environment for blending DevOps with the right tools for both rapid, dynamic development and reliable, secure life cycle management.  If I had the same flexibility and collaboration back in my days as a VM developer, I am sure that things would have been much different – and truly agile, before the term “agile development” was ever invented.

Learn more about SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for z Systems and LinuxONE at https://www.suse.com/products/systemz

Keep in touch @JeffReserNC