Ansible by Red Hat® can help organizations achieve an effective approach to business automation, but the path to DevOps can be long and complex. Outdated habits must be replaced with more efficient practices, but new tools and processes require buy-in from various stakeholders across the organization. Additionally, groups must be taught the specific best practices for their work. Red Hat Consulting helps customers successfully adopt and integrate Ansible to create and sustain standardized, centralized automation practices that add business and market value and build a solid foundation for DevOps.

Red Hat Open Innovation Labs is an immersive residency that arms customers with the skills, tools, and process to deliver better software, more quickly, to meet the mandates of today’s market.

Whether it’s co-creating a disruptive product, catalyzing cultural transformation in the enterprise, or discovering what’s possible with a suite of proven and open tools and methods — Open Innovation Labs is designed to accelerate organizations’ most innovative ideas

One thing is clear when you look back at the past decades of IT and software engineering: everything changes. Periods of gradual improvement in hardware, language, infrastructure, and methodology are punctuated by paradigm-shifting innovation.

This evolution has allowed IT to stay ahead of ever-changing business demands, but it has not been easy or cheap. Many IT budgets are consumed by maintaining the old stuff and staying current with upgrades and migrations can deplete funding and resources before business benefits are realized. With the right approach, it is possible to modernize a portfolio of applications in a way that yields value quicker and at lower cost — making it easier and less expensive to stay current as products and technologies continue to evolve.

In this whitepaper, Red Hat takes a look at three specific software development patterns to modernize existing applications. These modernization patterns address transitioning existing applications to more modern architectures and infrastructure and making them accessible to new applications. This paper also examines the conditions that lead to rewriting when that is the only option. These patterns help enterprises figure out how to get the most out of existing applications and establish a practice for continuous modernization that will serve the business now and in the future.

Businesses are increasingly interested in the value of container adoption. In the next two years, over 90% of organizations will make new investments in containers and other emerging technologies that facilitate DevOps. Seventy-one percent of organizations anticipate using containers for cloud applications or are already using them.

These figures can be attributed to the results organizations are already achieving with containers: nearly three quarters of businesses who use them report that they can now ship new software up to 10% faster.

In many leading companies, IT must provide tools to help the business respond to competition, comply with industry regulations, and engage customers. IT is expected to provide solutions that are high quality, flexible enough for rapid, frequent change, and available at predictable preferably low cost.

Custom software development and business automation are two ways to give business stakeholders the solutions they want, when they want them. But the two approaches have different benefits and drawbacks. Software development is an engineering discipline with rigorous, but historically slow, processes. Business automation reduces time to market by letting nontechnical stakeholders codify business logic, resulting in increased risk.

Advances in software development infrastructure and approaches provide the tools and opportunity to modernize business automation. A design approach that applies best practices from modern software development to business automation can help organizations take advantage of this opportunity by adding rigorous engineering practices while eliminating additional risk. Using this approach to business automation, businesses can engage subject matter experts to codify business logic in a way that ensures the higher quality, faster time to market, and lower, predictable cost associated with modern software development.