We are all doing (or want to do) DevOps

Many of us have being doing it for years and just didn’t know what it was called. In some cases, we were sternly rebuked when we were found to be doing it. Thankfully those days are (mostly) in the past.

When we move from organisation to organisation the adoption and mechanics of the DevOps process can vary markedly. In fact, it’s not unusual to see different approaches to DevOps within the same company. So why the variety? A slick DevOps framework can deliver and manage a faster change regime than the traditional project based delivery. The temptation is to go after the ‘low hanging fruit’, let’s face it we all like an easy starter. Sometimes we get so stuck in this rut of optimising and automating that we forget where our talents could be best focused, enter the legacy application.

Legacy apps don’t fit the traditional DevOps model

They are old, seldom documented and often out with any formal support process. There’s no easy path to live, things are hard to monitor and development processes could be impossible to automate. In many cases their function and their value are only understood by a few people in the organisation. Herein lies the problem, the legacy app doesn’t have a champion to fight their corner and demand modernisation.

Yet many would suggest that the biggest opportunity for any organisation is in taking control of its legacy apps. Looking at these apps we should very quickly be able to understand the function and plan a roadmap. This could take the form of a simple re-write to bring functionality up to the required level or a re-architecting to allow deployment onto a supported infrastructure. This initial review might conclude that the app is no longer required or is unsalvageable, allowing the business to make sensible decisions around decommissioning or replacement.

At Quorum we have been utilising DevOps techniques for a number of years our infrastructure teams work closely with our development teams to ensure that the solutions we deliver have all round optimisation, automation and monitoring, from the first instance of scoping right through to the final user experience.

We work with clients to establish the best path of remediation for legacy applications. This can be as simple as a reskinning exercise right through to a full rewrite or re-architecting. For clients who want to ensure that a remediated application never falls back into the unsupported legacy category we provide ongoing support for these applications and can also deploy them into cloud environments where we can ensure that future infrastructure development impacts are minimised and mitigated. And once we fix the application, the DevOps improvements follow.

So the next time you hear someone say that DevOps is all wrong for Legacy apps, perhaps you may beg to differ?