Video produced by Steve Nathans-Kelly
At Data Summit Connect 2020 Bruno Kurtic, founding VP, strategy and solutions, Sumo Logic, explained the three digital transformation fundamentals.
Full videos of Data Summit Connect 2020 presentations are available at www.dbta.com/DBTA-Downloads/WhitePapers.
"As we try to sort of transform into a digital enterprise and do that effectively, the first transformation that could go through is the software lifecycle transformation," Kurtic said. "The software lifecycle transformation is going from a traditional waterfall software development methodology, which was developed for the previous stage of this industrial revolution where software needed to change relatively infrequently. It was built and designed to run for a while where it was impacting slow-moving processes like changes in supply chain or manufacturing and things like that."
Organizations are now shifting and transforming that into agile software development. DevOps supports a far more iterative and rapid evolution of that software because software is no longer a means to an end, he explained. The digital experience has evolved to become the product.
"An agile software development methodology enables us to iterate, get feedback, improve, and essentially innovate much faster," Kurtic said. "The second change that we're going through is the environment within which this software that we built as a digital company runs it. The environment used to be running inside of private hybrid clouds or data centers on premise. And we're now moving to public cloud, where we are running majority of our software today."
This cloud transformation is being driven by the need for flexibility and agility. In the cloud, users are able to acquire the technology that is needed to run software on and lease it for very short periods of time, optimize, improve.
"So cloud is all about flexibility," Kuritc said. "The third change that we're going through as we're becoming software businesses, is that our architectures are now moving from what is commonly known as client/server or three/tier architecture, which was designed again for the old world of software, which was designed to run on physical servers, large boxes, creating monolithic stacks, where you have to compromise on what you can run on those servers. You couldn't run five databases. You have to settle and pick one. And we'll use that."
Companies are now moving to microservices. Microservices architectures are very much analogous to cloud and agile because they allow users to componentize their software into a set of business services, as small as possible, and to evolve each one of those business services independently, Kurtic said.