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Introduction
DevOps [a portmanteau of development and operations] is a system of combining technologies that increase automation, collaboration and rapid iteration to drive measurable ROI for software development companies, startups and established enterprises. Improving development by increasing team efficiency seems simple in theory but it presents a complex challenge in practice and it requires enterprises to move towards creating a software factory, fully equipped with a virtual assembly line that includes design, development, QA testing, product monitoring, and the like. Companies like Amazon, Netflix and Adobe do this exceptionally well. In this white paper BGV Partners Venkat Raghavan and Anik Bose share their perspective on what’s next as DevOps automation becomes increasingly cloud centric.
DevOps and the Cloud: Key Trends
Once upon a time, enterprise businesses would ship one or two software releases per year. Today, most cloud native businesses push out multiple releases per day. The scope and speed of software delivery in the Enterprise 4.0 era places DevOps center stage in resource planning and budget decision making for enterprise executives. As DevOps automation becomes increasingly cloud-centric, DevOps change management can no longer be dealt with manually. Business leaders are significantly ramping up spend to improve and optimize cloud adoption strategies and to launch migration and modernization initiatives in a way that maintains the speed and centrality of DevOps performance. According to the “State of the Cloud 2020” report, organizational spend on cloud infrastructure already outpaces budgets by 23%, and is positioned to do so again by 47% in the next 12 months. The report points out that “Cloud use often goes hand in hand with adopting DevOps processes. Organizations will frequently choose to implement configuration management tools that allow them to standardize and automate deployment and configuration of servers and applications. The quest to reduce cost and the increasing adoption of DevOps are driving up the use of containers. Docker and Kubernetes use continues to grow, and many users are also adopting container-as-a-service offerings from AWS, Azure and Google.”
This “as a service” mindset, has fully penetrated internal product development, underscoring the significance of automated DevOps, and now cuts across all functions of the modern enterprise. Furthermore this trend has only been amplified due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the introduction and proliferation of digital first operating models.
BGV Perspective: Programmable Cloud Enables a “Shift Left” in DevOps
We use the term Programmable Cloud to refer to a set of automation and AI techniques that harness the power of distributed, dynamic and ephemeral infrastructures to extract digital intelligence. As DevOps become increasingly cloud-centric, we believe that Programmable Cloud is the gear it must leverage to exploit Cloud Native architectures and scale automated remediation across a variety of intelligent workflows. This represents a massive shift left in DevOps that is simply not possible without Programmable Cloud.
As such, Programmable Cloud plays a pivotal role as an emerging imperative for DevOps. At BGV, we see many of our cloud native portfolio companies that combine AI, intelligent automation and propriety access to data to deliver actionable insights leveraging the gear of Programmable Cloud. More recently we are seeing the advent of Enterprise 4.0 startups that are building disruptive businesses around Programmable Cloud. Our recent investment in Evinced, a startup that automates accessibility compliance presents a powerful example.
Evinced leverages the power of Programmable Cloud and AI to provide an enterprise grade digital accessibility platform for modern software development teams. Having recently announced a $17M raise, Evinced equips businesses with the tools to make their digital offerings accessible to all. This means that those who have visual, auditory, motor or cognitive disabilities can still access, maneuver and easily navigate websites, mobile applications or electronic documents. According to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) one in four adults in the US live with a disability. This, combined with the dramatic increase in cloud-based software applications, is creating exponential growth for accessibility compliance.
Compliance is no longer a back-office function. It has emerged as a corporate brand issue, implying that companies must invest time, resources and capital into website accessibility compliance to ensure their products and services can successfully be used by people with a diverse range of disabilities. Evinced uses computer vision and AI to automatically detect and pinpoint difficult screen reader and keyboard interaction problems. Context-based code inspection ensures the code of interactable elements is inspected to check accessibility implementation. Evinced also offers component grouping which consolidates hundreds of issues to check accessibility implementation, and automates this entire process.
Treating accessibility issues as an afterthought can have legal consequences. The Golden State Warriors are facing a lawsuit alleging violations of the American with Disabilities Act (“ADA”) and California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act (“UCRA”) because its website is not fully accessible to blind and visually impaired consumers. This isn’t just the law, it is increasingly being treated as an ethical necessity by major corporates and industry heavyweights. Consider the following corporate initiatives:
- Samsung collaborates regularly with the American Federation of the Blind to develop accessibility advancements for a quality user experience for people with disabilities.
- Microsoft’s commitment to accessibility includes working with governments and organizations around the world to deliver the benefits of digital technology to those with disabilities.
- Capital One has adopted the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and uses the Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) specification for all of its products and services.
Beyond the moral and legal issues, however, the time delays and labor costs of repairing damage, or retroactively “curing” the software design, at a corporate level, could compound the damage of manual intervention into the DevOps process, and constitutes an entirely new complexity challenge. The very nature of accessibility compliance makes clear that the remediation of intelligent workflows must be built directly into the product design at the outset, as a best practice.
Conclusion
With COVID-19 accelerating the shift to the cloud, a burst in cloud-based application development is increasing the demand for accessibility compliance across all of that UI-facing code. By identifying material accessibility issues and prescribing top issues to be fixed — even delivering “code snippets” that developers can inject into their DevOps CI CD pipelines — Evinced delivers a game changing and industry-first AI accessibility platform that leverages Programmable Cloud to seamlessly integrate with the workflows of modern DevOps teams in a Cloud Native architecture. In doing so, Evinced can bring together business stakeholders, compliance, application owners and developers to address the strategic needs of the business to deliver democratized access to digital services.
Evinced demonstrates how weaving in automated diagnostics and prescriptive solutions for accessibility into all facets of software development — from design, development, QA testing and production monitoring greatly eases the accessibility compliance and manual testing burden. Accessibility compliance automation enables accessibility teams to leverage automation data to quickly scale their scope and coverage, while operating at the speed of DevOps.
We believe enterprises should take heed, and “Shift left” with DevOps to embed programable cloud directly into the fabric of software design, as a matter of principle. Those that do will lead the future of DevOps and will shape the Enterprise 4.0 innovation wave.
