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Technology-agnostic Approach is Key to Digital Transformation in 2023

By Paul Stovell, founder and CEO of Octopus Deploy

As organizations continue their digital transformation journeys, three emerging approaches will have a major impact on business success in 2023. First, Gartner predicts that cloud-native platforms will be the foundation for more than 95% of new digital initiatives by 2025. This means that teams are increasingly moving toward cloud-native technologies to deliver solutions at scale.

Next, with a shift towards new technologies, CTOs want standardized processes and do not want to be locked into any specific technology stack. In order to achieve this flexibility, technology-agnostic tools can help build a technology stack that can adapt to rapid technological changes.

Last, DevOps has been crucial in improving the software development life cycle (SDLC) by extracting lessons from lean manufacturing and agile. The emergence of platform engineering enhances this further by enabling self-service operations for developers.

Let's dive more into the key areas IT leaders should focus on for business impact in 2023:

Cloud-native technology delivers solutions at scale

It is no secret that the cloud is where businesses want to position themselves to succeed in the modern age. Organizations transitioning to the cloud use a mix of traditional, cloud-enabled, and cloud-native systems. Traditional systems are conventional data centers that are self-hosted. Cloud-enabled systems are former conventional systems converted to run in the cloud. Cloud-native systems are designed and created for the cloud and take full advantage of its benefits. One of the key characteristics of cloud-native applications is loosely coupled microservices running on containers. Rather than having one monolithic application, cloud-native applications use containers to modularize components. Containerization enables the scalability of the cloud to be realized through container orchestration tools like Kubernetes.

Technology-agnostic tools can give you better flexibility when delivering applications

If you have decided to build a cloud-native application, you can combine many different combinations of tools for your technology stack. These tools may be open source, paid software, or developed in-house. All these types of tools can lock you into a specific technology stack. An example would be a vendor that requires you to use a specific cloud platform like Azure, AWS, or GCP. Being technology-agnostic means that your technology doesn't lock you into a specific vendor. Technology-agnostic applications excel in integrations. They usually have integrations into several platforms so that you can choose which one to go with. As a technology-agnostic vendor, tools like Octopus support all of the major cloud platforms and has community-driven step templates for various technologies.

Platform engineering treats developers like customers

DevOps has enabled software to be delivered with speed and quality thanks to the lessons learned from lean manufacturing and agile. The goal of DevOps was to emphasize the importance of shared responsibility in the live production environment. However, an anti-pattern arose when developers were burdened with operations tasks as managers downsized teams to save costs. Platform engineering is a course correction to allow developers to focus on developing. To address this, an internal platform is created and maintained for developers to self-serve any operations tasks. With one click, they can get a working build and deployment process, pre-configured to integrate with monitoring and scripts to create infrastructure.

Bottom line

In 2023, cloud-native platforms are on the rise. This trend is seen across all industries, and organizations must keep up with the benefits of scalability, reliability, and return on investment that cloud-native applications bring. To deliver these applications, technology-agnostic approaches can give your business flexibility to deliver support for different technology stacks. If you want to give your developers the best environment to deliver software, then platform engineering may help. Platform engineering creates an internal product for developers to self-serve operations tasks, allowing them to focus more on development. Focusing on these things will set you up for success in 2023.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paul Stovell is Founder and CEO of Octopus Deploy (www.octopus.com). He started Octopus in mhis spare time in 2011, and today it helps thousands of companies to automate their deployments.