An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief
As companies scale up their DevOps CI/CD efforts, especially in the context of cloud-native application development, drift soon becomes a problem.
Drift refers to inconsistencies in the repositories (repos) that support software builds across the organization. For example, different repos may contain different versions of a particular code library.
Atomist addresses the drift problem with a governance platform that works at three layers of abstraction.
The lowest layer contains ‘aspects,’ which are coded representations of desired behavior. The platform contains several pre-built aspects, and developers are welcome to build their own.
The aspects support technical policies at the next abstraction layer up. At this level, a policy might state, for example, that all builds should use a particular version of a library.
At the topmost abstraction, policies are business-oriented. For example, the appdev leadership team may establish broad guidelines for making decisions about versions, including how to deal with incompatibilities and rollbacks, as well as how to comply with relevant regulations. Atomist can also provide the necessary audit trails.
While drift is the problem that Atomist has decided to tackle first, in reality its platform is a general-purpose cloud-native appdev governance platform that organizations can use to establish appropriate guiderails without slowing down the CI/CD effort.
But ‘governance’ has a negative connotation among developers, so Atomist is focusing instead on drift for now.
Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Cortex newsletter, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.
