Electric Cloud Aims to Make DevOps More Accessible

Source- devops.com

Electric Cloud today unfurled the Winter 2019 edition of the ElectricFlow platform for managing DevOps, which makes it easier for different classes of users to tailor the platform to meet their specific needs.

Sam Fell, vice president of marketing for Electric Cloud, said the latest release of ElectricFlow allows end users to choose from different personas based on their role in the organization, and each persona has a user interface crafted to surface the level of detail they most likely require. That approach is intended to make the company’s DevOps platform more accessible to a wider variety of end users, he said.

The latest edition of ElectricFlow also adds a customizable customer login experience that is more task-oriented. Users can now add bookmarks/favourites to access specific pages faster.

Finally, Electric Cloud is now including release and pipeline templates that make onboarding easier, based on user created events/triggers and code check-ins in a Git repository.

Fell said that while DevOps platform such as ElectricFlow increasingly have incorporated higher levels of automation by relying more on machine learning algorithms, humans should not be left behind. Electric Cloud has been focusing more of its development effort on making it easier for DevOps professionals of all skill levels to derive value from the platform, he said, noting current DevOps platforms tend to make available far too much information than the average IT professional can ingest, added Fell.

Less clear is how the complexity inherent in DevOps processes extends the time it takes for an organization to employ DevOps pervasively. While DevOps platforms are undoubtedly powerful, they also can be intimidating. In many instances, it’s simply easier for IT administrators to continue to rely on tools they already know to manage a specific task even when that tool is not as robust or rich as what might be accessible in a more modern DevOps platform. What often is ascribed to cultural IT inertia may have its roots in the simple fact that IT professionals are not always equally excited about having to learn and master new tools.

The number of IT organizations that have been able to employ DevOps processes across their entire organization is still a comparative minority. Most organizations today have what can best be described as pockets of DevOps processes, usually driven by a small, cross-function team that is highly motivated to update a specific set of applications continuously. IT organizations are, of course, hoping to replicate the success of those teams across the rest of the organization. However, the rest of the IT organization doesn’t always have the same level of engineering skills—the spirit may be willing, but the initial DevOps hurdles needed to be overcome are simply too high.

It may be a while before IT organizations sort this all out. More accessible tools are only one part of the equation. But IT leaders almost inevitably find that giving their teams access to easier tools will, at the very least, start moving their organization in the right direction.