A match made in Daniela Chetcuti and Jonathan Cassar
A debate has been ensuing for some time on how far the DevOps approach and culture can or will permeate the public sector; especially due to the upcoming modernisation of Government IT systems through the new *MITA hybrid cloud platform. The second Tech Debate, organised by the Programme Management Department (PMD) held during Q2 2018 saw the participation of several MITA employees hailing from different departments. The sharing of knowledge, information and expertise ensured a richer debate on the changes that will impact the whole operational landscape of the agency. The panel brought together experts from the Infrastructure Services Department (ISD); responsible for MITA’s IT Infrastructure, the Information Security Governance Department (ISGD); responsible for the overall safeguarding of Government data and processes and the PMD which is the extended technical arm for the delivery of digital services to government.
Software and the internet have transformed the world and its industries. Software no longer merely supports a business; rather it became an integral component and driver for business. Software is also used to increase operational efficiencies by transforming every part of the value chain; such as communications, logistics and operations. Transitioning to DevOps will enable development teams to carry out several operational tasks which will add agility to the rate of product and service delivery.
Most businesses nowadays understand that to remain relevant and competitive, they cannot ignore digital transformation; that is: the adoption of technologies and methodologies to create added-value in their products and services. Government of course, is not immune to these changes and needs to adapt accordingly. As outlined in the National Digital Strategy, “MITA will implement new technologies to keep Government operations at the forefront of the digital world”. Both DevOps and Cloud technology are often propositioned as must haves for achieving this digital transformation. However, the relationship between the two is often complicated, if not outright confusing. While DevOps primarily is about processes and process improvement, Cloud is about technology and services. They are not mutually exclusive, but need to work together to help us achieve our transformation goals.
The debate attempted to find a common understanding of what is meant by DevOps; especially within MITA. The definition of DevOps by the panel varied from one individual to another, but in general it can be summarised in two points of view: a) Having a developer friendly organisation where IT operations is still separate from developer arms However it is critical to have dev-friendly operations that are provided through, for example a set of self-service components for the provisioning of infrastructure. Another example is providing automated pipelines b) DevOps as a “single” team where developers take on operations responsibilities and vice-versa. The definition of what is cloud, proved to be somewhat easier for the debating panel because Government has just acquired a Hybrid Cloud and the panellists were well versed on the topic. A typical definition of a Hybrid Cloud is an environment that uses a mix of on-premise private cloud and a third-party public cloud service (such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform) with proper interaction between the two platforms. However, no direct control over the architecture of a public cloud can be achieved; and given Government’s sensitive data, MITA opted for a Hybrid Cloud, so that whenever required it can isolate and store for code deployment.