Insanity? No Way -- DevOps Instead!
Learn how to save time, money and frustration by implementing DevOps
We’ve all heard the infamous quote from Albert Einstein:
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
The basis of this profound statement was that human beings will do the same thing over and over, even if they don’t intend to. But in the world of technology, humans can rarely manually replicate perfectly, but perfect replication is an absolute necessity.
So, what does replication have to do with DevOps?
In talking with two of our leading experts in Qlik Consulting, Dave Denscombe and Adam Haydon, DevOps is comprised of two primary principles. One, building collaboration across technology teams – Development, Quality Assurance, and Operations – and two, utilizing a truly repeatable automation to ensure consistency and accuracy.
Without automation, there is too much left to chance that human error will creep in, which leads to unnecessary disruptions and finger-pointing to who is at fault. Therefore, the hallmark of successful DevOps is where the automation ensures each team can work autonomously, with confidence, because all teams expect and execute the process the same way, every time.
According to Dave and Adam in the world of Qlik, the necessity for repeatability is often found where companies manually build and maintain their servers, especially across multiple environments. Introducing any change, such as a Windows update or deploying an application with custom properties, can often lead to hours/days/weeks of time spent troubleshooting and playing the “blame game” as the teams reconcile who created the unintended differences. The result is companies avoiding or lessening updates and new app deployments which leads to unhappy users.
So, how do you solve this with Qlik? Adam developed a module called Qlik-CLI that provides a set of commands for viewing and editing configuration settings, as well as managing tasks and other features available through the APIs. By incorporating Qlik-CLI, the customer can now pre-set their configuration used in the automation for creating an environment. That means when Development is ready to hand over to Quality Assurance, the QA team can build their environment using the exact same configuration settings Development expects, and the same when moving from QA to Production. That’s true DevOps!
In another situation, a customer had extreme seasonal usage of Qlik. At points of the year, the users and volume of data could be almost exponentially heavier than other times. Therefore, they were looking for a solution that would allow them to expand and contract their Qlik server capacity in the cloud to meet their seasonal demand. By implementing DevOps with Qlik-CLI, they were able to not only save money in cloud-based servers by using only what was needed, but they also improved quality and productivity by focusing their attention on developing new apps and insights for their users.
Qlik-CLI is available for download from Qlik Branch. But if you’d like assistance, visit qlik.com/consulting.