Interview: Designing the right user experience drives both cloud architecture and DevOps practices

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Contemporary markets pose an open question

Do you start your digital business transformation by adopting DevOps tools and practices—for continuous integration and delivery of code changes–or by transforming the context in which they will be used?

It’s now a platitude that you must reach customers in your market in ways that let them engage with your business anytime and anywhere during their increasingly technology-enhanced lives. For instance, no bank that expects to grow lacks a mobile banking application, and no service-oriented business can afford not to have a mobile-friendly online point of access and a program to reward customer loyalty.

Creating and keeping applications relevant to mobile technology users requires speed in execution that traditional software development and delivery processes–and the monolithic application stacks they serve–have been failing to sustain.

In a recent interview discussing the development and delivery processes on IBM Bluemix using the IBM Bluemix Garage Method, Rachel Reinitz, Bluemix Garage CTO, gives an unequivocal answer to the common challenge of maintaining speed in application execution: In short, as part of the cultural change specific to your organization, to better compete in current markets, you must figure out how to change both development context (think cloud platform adoption) and practices in the right combination but at the same time.

Interview with Rachel Reinitz

As part of the recent Open Cloud Summit in San Francisco, and in preparation for launch of a new Bluemix Garage in Melbourne, Australia later this month, Reinitz talked about the value of a cloud platform in enabling the cultural change each organization needs to make in adopting a DevOps model that operates at scalable velocity.

How Bluemix facilitates an organization’s DevOps cultural transformation

Though they reflect transformation in how software is made and made available, DevOps practices are fundamentally about engaging better with customers of specific businesses. Changes in how a customer needs your service will happen as fast as either you or your competitors imagine application-enhanced experiences that generate the energy of new needs. That’s why the Bluemix Garage Method keeps the user experience at the center of focus.

Focusing on user experience is key to DevOps and successful business outcomes

Since the internet is now used predominantly on mobile devices, mobile-first development becomes the default, yet fits into a multi-layered design and DevOps process.

Omnichannel user experience leads to multilayered architectures/DevOps

Figuring out a strategy to evolve the IT architecture for an organization inevitably means deciding on what hybrid to make between existing and new systems and practices.

Responding to shifts in user experience requires an evolving hybrid architecture

What to do from here:

Get more information on how to make cloud technology work best for you:

• Bluemix Garage Method orients you with DevOps-related resources for rapid app delivery and innovation
• Rapidly developing applications with microservices is a blog series on getting to minimum viable products whether you are modernizing existing applications of developing new ones cloud natively.
• For modernizing and refactoring a monolithic application, visit the microservices architecture center and view a detailed architectural progression.
• For developing a cloud native (‘greenfield’) application, view an interactive architecture diagram of a microservices online store application and access a tutorial on deploying the same app in a Kubernetes cluster.
• Refocus on the big picture of cloud adoption.