In the previously siloed world of information technology infrastructure, systems administrators and developers generally came together only when they passed each other in the hallway. Not anymore. Organizations are increasingly under pressure to speed software deployment while managing the complexities of clouds, servers and virtual machines in a chaotic IT world. This has led to a movement towards developer operations where administrators and software developers are working more closely together than ever before, even combining skills in some cases.

“DevOps is forcing infrastructure and IT to understand that availability and reliability, which we’ve always been measured on, is no longer the core measurement. It’s agility and availability and delivering unique services,” said Josh Atwell (pictured, left), developer advocate at NetApp Inc.

Atwell stopped by theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with host John Furrier (@furrier) and guest host Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor) during the NetApp Insight event in Las Vegas, Nevada. He was joined by Jason Benedicic (pictured, right), principal consultant at ANS Group Ltd, and they discussed how NetApp offers tools to assist the DevOps world along with the skills required to be successful. (* Disclosure below.)

Tools for the DevOps community

NetApp has focused on providing DevOps engineers with enterprise tools to meet the needs of the development community. Database provisioning, for example, can be an onerous task, so the company offers ONTAP FlexClone for DevOps environments, which can create a writable copy of an existing volume in any size.

The company often finds itself working with the DevOps community to meet challenging requests, where the requirements aren’t completely clear, but work must progress in the test bed as quickly as possible. “IT is not comfortable with that conversation, but NetApp has developed the integrations and toolsets to make that conversation a little bit easier,” Atwell said.

ANS Group has been focused on helping customers adapt to cloud environments, while assessing applications and determining the best way to move data. This often requires working with DevOps staff to sort through transitional challenges, which takes time and the right set of skills. “People need to understand that DevOps isn’t something that you can buy,” Benedicic explained. “You need to build. You need to get the right people, processes and mindset.”

As NetApp has focused on tools that will stabilize IT environments, the company also understands that the changes in enterprise computing models are part of the maturity process as well, especially when it comes to DevOps. “We’re definitely, from a DevOps perspective, in that juvenile phase where we’re learning who we are and the changes that are happening to us as we go,” Atwell concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of NetApp Insight US 2017. (* Disclosure: NetApp Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither NetApp nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE