DevOps Managed Services – Enterprise Cloud Development (ECD) is being introduce as a new category or social construct within the software development industry. ECD is comprise of a five step pathway. The pathway isn’t so much a market maturity model as it is a business line capability model. The five steps are define as:

Step 1 – Embrace the Cloud. This step is about organizing your data and aggregating the data sets. So that they can easily traced or reported upon. Whether you are a new team member on a team or an attorney looking for code that has been list in a lawsuit knowing where to find your data is the first step in being able to do something with that data.

Step 2 – Implement Community Architecture. As Brian Behlendorf (Founder of the Subversion and Apache open source projects). And Tim O’Reilly (founder of O’Reilly Media) explored in late 1990s there is a unique magic found in creating open source communities behind the corporate firewall. Through associations of data you can begin building conversations. And architecting communities and threading stories around code, conversations or documents that relate to the software development lifecycle (SDLC).

Since the late 1990s terms like Innersourcing grew from companies like Phillips (now NXP). Sun Microsystems or Motorola who implemented community architectures. In the late 2000s organizations like Red Hat, Inc. or the consultants at Olliance Group began adopting the term innersource and further validated Behlendorf and O’Reilly pioneering thought leadership. This work has furthered by folks like Dan Pink who analyze the open source industry to uncover. The mysteries of what motivates and drives us to excel and innovate at work.

Step 3 – Codify Development Processes. Once your data has been aggregate and your innersource community has been architected you can begin to contemplate how you do your work. This contemplation is often call process. Today Scrum, eXtreme Programming and Kanban are amongst some of the most popular processes to choose from for software development teams. What’s more entire business lines or organizational transformations can began through Step 3. Process change agents believe that lasting organizational change can begin with process because of the link between process and culture.

Step 4 – Orchestrate DevOps. The idea is simply that development teams and traditional IT Operations groups are joining forces and will soon coexist on one team. One acid test of software development teams maturity is to see how close your development and IT Operations teams are. Here’s a hint: the closer, the better.

Step 5 – Leverage Hybrid Cloud. Hybrid cloud infrastructures are infrastructure’s that utilize both private (behind the firewall). And public (beyond the firewall) clouds to do different types of software development. For example developers on a team may utilize and internal tooling infrastructure to trace community based conversations but also utilize the Amazon.com EC2 public cloud for elastic on demand testing from seven global locations. Teams utilizing a hybrid strategy are seen as advanced.

Software development organizations can utilize this social construct or blueprint as a means of gaining capabilities. And moving from one step to the next in the hopes of making technology or process improvements. Enterprise Cloud Development assessments are now becoming readily available.