Introduction
Intel is a large corporation, which limits the speed at which it can pivot its business and development practices. Any major change in these areas requires corresponding amounts of planning and designing the infrastructure to be beneficial. A poorly-planned change can cause significant negative consequences, which will require additional time and resources to mitigate. Thus, pivoting towards a method before it has been thoroughly tested, and its requisite infrastructure has been planned incurs major risks for an organization. For a corporation as large as Intel, such risks may not be acceptable. Therefore, it is reasonable to observe Agile’s adoption and use by Intel’s competitors to identify the best practices to aid in the corporation’s implementation.
Discussion
DevOps generally relies on infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or platform as a service (PaaS) cloud computing models to be effective. PaaS, which Intel uses, provides a programming language ecosystem as a cloud service. This allows for a faster development cycle, a critical goal for Agile and DevOps methods (Zettler, n. d.). Therefore, PaaS is a strong choice for these methods, although IaaS is a reasonable alternative.
For Intel, using PaaS allows distributed development teams to work on projects regardless of their physical location. As a large corporation with sites in 56 countries, this benefit is crucial as it allows specialists to work together on developing and testing code (Condon, 2019). Furthermore, the same access to data from multiple locations facilitates its analysis, including analysis by AI and machine learning algorithms (Condon, 2019). In the future, using PaaS will allow Intel to scale its development resources as necessary with relatively little effort and allow new sites to be created in virtually any location. The only limitation to this is the location’s reliable Internet access.
Conclusion
DevOps is a method aimed at shortening an organization’s development cycle. Thus, the primary criteria to measure its success are related to this goal. For instance, the frequency of update deployments is a reliable metric. The time it takes to test, discover, and correct any code errors can also be used as a metric of DevOps’ success. On the business side, the efficiency and profitability of projects before and after the method’s implementation can be used as indicators of the movement’s ultimate benefit to the organization.
References
Condon, S. (2019). Scaling Agile, adopting AI: How Intel is making IT a strategic part of the business. ZDnet. Web.
Zettler, K. (n. d.) Platform as a Service. Atlassian. Web.