Starting Left — A Major Paradigm Shift in DevOps
“Start Left” is not the evolution of today’s popular “Shift Left” paradigm but constitutes a brand new approach toward software development and DevOps as a whole. This new approach aims to prevent security vulnerabilities, inefficiencies, health and performance problems, and scalability challenges from the beginning, by connecting development- and DevOps tools to a central policy management plain. This policy management plane is where IT operations defines and continuously updates the desired state of all software and infrastructure services within the enterprise. Developers consume all Application and Infrastructure APIs through one unified API that provides access to all applications and infrastructure services in a controlled manner (see chart below).
Sounds Great, But How Does It Work?
“Start left” is based on the idea of codifying, managing, and monitoring one central set of policies that cover software development, testing, deployment, and day 2 operations. Developers, operators, Site Reliability Engineers (SRE), database admins, and all other roles are tethered to these policies through the DevOps toolchain. When developers crack open their IDE (integrated development environment) in the morning, the IDE has already been synched with all the relevant policies that will provide role-specific guidance and automation for each developer role and individual developer. Ideally, this guidance will not (or at least not significantly) add to a developer’s workload and often, it can simply happen in the background, without any disruption.
Tools, Platforms, and Infrastructure for Starting Left
In this video interview Pratik Gupta (CTO, IBM Hybrid Cloud) and Matt Rodkey (program director for IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management) explain how IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management provides the centralized policy guardrails and automation capabilities to “Start Left” without overburdening developers with overhead coding tasks.
The Fundamental Difference between Shift Left and Start Left
“Shift Left” adds significant overhead to the plate of software developers by requiring them to codify instructions for the deployment and operation of their code. Writing and managing this code often leads to hard decisions between completing the deployment and operations code on the one hand, and finishing the actual application code on time, on the other. “Starting Left” means to relieve developers of most of these overhead coding tasks by baking them into the DevOps toolchain. This enables the automated enforcements of rules in all areas and at the same time ensures an ultimate level of consistency and continuous auditability.
Stay tuned for more articles on “Shift Left”.
