Bimodal IT is a Gartner term coined to express that IT
organizations need to support both traditional and innovative modes of IT
solution delivery and operation. What
exactly is Bimodal IT and what does it look like in practice? How does the Bimodal IT concept mesh with the
adoption of cloud technologies and the move towards greater IT automation in
general? In this post, we'll attempt to
make sense of these concepts and how cloud technology is applied to enable a
Bimodal approach.
What is Bimodal IT?
Bimodal IT expresses the idea of IT operating in two different modes: traditional and disruptive. Mode 1 is traditional
mode, which prioritizes delivering and operating solutions to established and
well-understood needs in a reliable and scalable way. Mode 2 is disruptive
mode, which is about spurring innovative solutions in an agile, fail-fast
fashion. What do these two modes look
like? It may be helpful to consider two
types of applications.
A mode 1 application in an enterprise
organization can be pictured as an industrialized, mission-critical application
that has been around and evolving slowly for years. The application (which is usually composed of
anywhere from 5 to 10 or more components) is likely running on a mix of legacy
(think RISC UNIX), dedicated (x86-based) and virtualized servers (VMWare and
perhaps Hyper-V) running in a private or hosted private datacenter, using a mix
of traditional and software-defined storage and connected by Ethernet and
Fibrechannel switches. Since it is
large, complex, long-lived and mission-critical, the IT organization
maintaining it and the developers or vendors supplying updates and upgrades have
in many cases been working on it for years and are highly concerned with
quality, reliability and predictable performance. There are many constituent teams that work
together in a sort of consortium, such as developers, testers, security and
compliance. The development process is
waterfall-based, managed by an application lifecycle management (ALM) suite of
some sort. Automation is scant, and in
particular it takes a long time to pull together infrastructure for those dev,
test and other teams to perform their jobs.
Nonetheless, assembling a production-like environment for testing,
security, compliance, etc. is seen as a necessity to minimize downtime and
other risks. As a result, release cycles
can stretch into many months.
A mode 2 application can be pictured as
a mobile, e-commerce or web-centric application that is aimed at moving into
new markets, improving engagement with new customer segments, or disrupting a
current market. The application is
modern to the degree that it can easily be run in a completely virtualized private
or public cloud environment, without the encumbrance of legacy or physical
infrastructure issues. The team is
conceived not as a loose consortium but as a unified, DevOps team of line of
business product managers, developers, testers, and operations folks working
collaboratively around an agile development methodology. Automation is built deeply into the process,
with infrastructure as code tools used to manage infrastructure via
well-documented RESTful API's, plus tools automating continuous integration
through continuous deployment of code into production.
Is Bi-Modal a Practical Concept or Merely a Helpful
One?
There is a good amount of back and
forth in the industry around whether Bimodal or two-speed IT is truly a helpful
and practical concept. In his article on how IT leaders are grappling with tech change, Dion
Hinchliffe argues that:
"bi-modal IT can be thought of a training wheels way of
thinking about the very different, nearly opposite, models for IT. In fact, it
turns out that to make bi-modal work, we generally need a mechanism for
connecting the two modes together in a way that respects their strengths while
adapting and transition one to the other"
There are compelling arguments made by
IT thought leaders such as Simon
Wardley (also cited by Hinchliffe) that to formulate
an effective IT strategy, you need a more detailed model that encompasses
multiple types of applications and teams that are bucketed into three stages, a
"tri-modal" model organized around the concept of Pioneers, Settlers and Town
Planners, that represent the innovation, systematization and industrialization
of applications.
So, does this mean that Bimodal IT is a
fluffy and overly simplified concept? I
think it can be helpful to remember that Gartner's core historical clientele is
large enterprises, many of which are in industries that are not cutting edge
technology adopters and which don't have massive budgets to effect change in a
forklift fashion. These IT organizations
have a hundreds and perhaps thousands of applications running in mode 1
today. Gartner's Bimodal IT bifurcation
helps IT leaders facing such a significant tail of legacy applications and
infrastructure be emboldened to proactively sponsor agile innovation teams to
establish a new set of mode 2 style practices in their organization, while they
figure out how to deal with the mode 1 stuff.
What Does This Have to Do with Cloud?
Bimodal IT, DevOps, agile are all cultural, organizational
or process paradigms. So, what do they
have to do with the cloud? As it turns
out, a lot. The cloud is both a
technology disruptor and enabler for IT.
Cloud is a disruptor because line of business organizations can take
their business elsewhere by choosing SaaS solutions such as salesforce.com, and
developers can choose to work on cloud-based such infrastructure such as AWS
rather than wait for IT to deliver infrastructure to develop and test on. Cloud is also an enabler. In mode 2 applications, with IT Ops and
developers collaborating in a DevOps fashion, cloud infrastructure enables
automation via RESTful APIs that make infrastructure functionally an extension
of the development process. So adoption
of cloud has a lot to do with enabling the new, innovative teams that are
described as part of the Bimodal IT approach.
Modernizing and speeding mode 1 applications can also be
addressed by cloud infrastructure, though not in the same way as mode 2. In mode 1 applications, it is more likely
that a private cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the first step in
speeding those long, waterfall cycles while maintaining a reasonably
risk-averse posture. Private cloud IaaS
offer an automated, portal-driven service version of the manually constructed
devtest application infrastructure environments. This kind of private IaaS accomplishes a
number of transformative things for mode 1 applications. First of all, dev, test, security and
compliance teams (as well as external contractors, vendors, etc.) can easily
access standardized, production-like environments to conduct high quality
processes in a fraction of the time. An
IaaS can usually serve up infrastructure environments in the scale of minutes,
as opposed to the scale of days or weeks for manual processes. By allowing teams to access infrastructure
rapidly and asynchronously at any time, 24x7, productivity ramps up
significantly. With standardized,
production-like environments available to all teams on demand, quality advances
at a much more even fashion across all teams, leading to shorter cycles with
fewer show-stopper bugs late in the cycle, and better software outcomes in
production deployment. Private cloud
IaaS is the first step for many mode 1 applications, followed by test
automation. These two steps form a
workable foundation for starting continuous integration and continuous delivery
processes, even with legacy applications running on mixed infrastructure.
Granted, putting together a private cloud IaaS for development, test, security
and compliance teams is not as easy as virtually swiping a credit card on
AWS. However, for teams dealing with the
reality of industrialized, mode 1 applications, it is probably the more
realistic path to achieve a significant change in velocity.
Conclusion
Bimodal, Trimodal or whatever modal IT are constructs to
help IT leaders take action to make their application lifecycles more agile and
innovative. Cloud is both a disruptive
motivator as well as an enabler for that action. By harnessing the right type of cloud
infrastructure as enablers, IT leaders can both sponsor the innovation of new, highly agile application cycles as well as modernize legacy
applications and infrastructure to move faster and evolve towards DevOps.
##
About the Author
Alex
Henthorn-Iwane joined QualiSystems in February 2013 and is responsible for
worldwide marketing and public relations. Prior to joining QualiSystems, Alex
was vice president of marketing and product management at Packet Design, Inc.,
a provider of network management software, and has 20+ years of experience in
senior management, marketing, and technical roles at networking and security
startups.
Through
his roles at QualiSystems, Packet Design, CoSine Communications, Corona
Networks and Lucent Technologies he has acquired expertise in cloud computing,
software defined networking and network function virtualization, DevOps, ITaaS,
and IT automation and orchestration. He has written for Embedded Computing,
Virtual Strategy Magazine, Datamation, SDN Central, Datacenter Knowledge and
InformationWeek.
These
days, Alex focuses a lot of his writing around the intersection of new,
programmable infrastructure technologies (cloud, SDx, NFV), DevOps and the orchestration
and automation enablement needed to make all of them a reality, in both the
enterprise and service provider/carrier space.
Connect
with him on LinkedIn, Twitter, or SlideShare.