#OnlyWhatYouDeployMatters

This blog post is part of the Everything is Code article.

Let’s start with the Why

(very short, I’ll promise)

I talk with many organizations, in the most recent years mostly enterprises. The common denominator: Looking for (business) agility.

Technical and business model innovation is disrupting industries. Business leaders of established organizations demand their companies to (digitally) transform, to get real-time, end-to-end insights of their companies, customers, and processes – Of their (aggregated) data – to be able to rapidly take fact-/data-based decisions that can be implemented quickly.

These series of blogs that compose into the Everything is Code article aims to give you some hints on the necessary transformation steps and how to approach the transformation process.

In this context, moving to the cloud* becomes the opportunity to achieve this highly demanded agility. Be careful, however, because doing the same things in the cloud that you on-premises will bring you costs saving, scalability, better resiliency, more possibility to deploy near your customers, better security but won’t bring you agility.

To achieve agility you will need to adopt a cloud-native approach. In the following 4 chapters, I will try to describe what does this means, using examples from our own transformation** and knowledge acquired in my daily work helping organizations during their journey to cloud.

Eventually, these steps will enable you to increase your capability to deploy features and updates to production, leading us to the title of this post and my guiding-line for this article:

#OnlyWhatYouDeployMatters

because it is my profound conviction that the only true measure of your (IT) agility is the number of deployments you do to production.

To give you an idea, as per today in an always evolving practice (devops is a journey!), we do

… and this is the number that I personally consider the real measure of (IT) agility.

As we will see with details in the upcoming posts composing this article, your deployment capacity depends on a few macro-factors that I like to summarize as:

Before moving to the next chapter, just a glimpse of what we will discuss in part /05/ where everything comes together:

Next Chapter: #Microservices

* Even if most of the things that I will mention could be rather cloud-agnostic, my expertise is on Microsoft technologies and Microsoft Azure. In this context and in transparency, Cloud becomes here almost a synonym of Microsoft Azure.

** I am referring here to the migration of our internal IT and applications used by Microsoft employees from our data-centers on-premises to Microsoft Azure.

…and clearly, it is not real if it is not on a t-shirt: