Reshaping your infrastructure management team's skills and profiles
In previous installments of my blog series around how IT infrastructure is turning into a software engineering business, I explored the changing face of infrastructure and the risks of software-based infrastructure control. In this final article, I share tips and recommendations on how your infrastructure management engineering teams can prepare for this change by upgrading their skills.
In search of the right infrastructure management skills
A DevOps operating model brings the obvious benefit of bringing development closer to the heart of operations, bridging the application and infrastructure cultures and blending team members’ skill sets. However, if an organization is to successfully drive the infrastructure management business, it must embrace a new level of standards in software engineering — a level very similar to today’s pure application software engineering techniques.
This shift will require future infrastructure management IT engineers to adapt and acquire new skills profiles, including disciplines that aren’t currently thought of as traditional for infrastructure management engineers. The ideal skill profile will include experience in:
- Software programming in medium to large software projects
- Structured, modern languages such as C#, Swift, Java, Python and Go
- Use and creation of packages, Pods or Nuggets and understanding the concept of a library of reusable assets and software code
- Use and understanding of object-oriented programming, fully versed in concepts like inheritance, polymorphism, interfaces, protocols, abstraction and encapsulation
- The "Don't repeat yourself" (DRY) concept
- Software architecture patterns ensuring separation of concerns, like model view controller (MVC) or MVVM
- Test-driven development (TDD) practices, automated testing, mock library and unit testing as part of a continuous integration / continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline
- Leveraging source code control systems and CI/CD for any development project
- Code validation concepts and formalisms, invariants in algorithms, proofs, state tables and Petri nets
Mapping the future of infrastructure management
The evolution of technology has pushed infrastructure management services to a level where it must address the faster speed of events and higher volumes of managed assets by at least two orders of magnitude.
In previous articles, we observed how the evolution of tooling is taking a very concrete turn toward managing infrastructure. Software controlling other software and using technologies like descriptive landscapes, CI/CD and other proven software engineering techniques is becoming necessary to manage infrastructure cost-effectively, predictively and safely.
I also explained the quality liability exposure and demonstrated why rigorously managing software quality and complexity will be fundamental.
Above, we have proposed a set of software engineering skills that we believe will become standard for IT service management engineers. The onus now lies on key stakeholders in the IT and software industries to work together to become a digital services industry — and enable enterprises to become future-proof and competitive in this new world.
Infrastructure management teams must embrace a new level of software engineering skills — one very similar to today’s pure application software engineering techniques.
How enterprises can enable the infrastructure skills transition
- Automating at scale, using sophisticated software engineering techniques to manage an increasingly complex digital landscape at scale and with high quality
- Proactively preparing the workforce with skillsets that include the established professional software engineering practices necessary to develop the sophisticated controls that enterprises require
On the other hand, they can also rely on an experienced partner to help them navigate this change.
At Atos, we have realized this shift to software engineering technologies in the world of managed IT services. With our hybrid cloud and infrastructure services, enterprises can avail adoption support consulting, landscape migration and ongoing management with automated techniques and APIs to drive service requests. We upgrade data centers to effortlessly run preinstalled commodities and applications in privileged data centers. As managed infrastructure becomes software objects, they can be ordered and managed as APIs, easily integrated in higher level controlling software.
Let's expect more to come.
Posted on: January 19, 2023
Alexis Mermet-Grandfille
Group CTO Strategic Technology AdvisorMember, Atos Research Community
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