Globalizing the Continuous Delivery Pipeline

Featured article by Rob Vandenberg, President and CEO of Lingotek

It’s mid-2014, and the final ribbons of red tape around development and operations are being shredded. Thanks to trends like BYOD and cloud computing, devops now works together as a unified organization, rather than throwing code over an invisible wall. It’s a necessary and timely evolution—especially for today’s sophisticated global IT environments. As IT’s role in business expands, and companies continue to ship apps around the world, building a successful continuous delivery pipeline will become more important than ever.

The Devops Aspiration

The Holy Grail of devops is to create a well-oiled software assembly line, but that’s forever a work-in-progress. The modern IT environment contains a seemingly infinite variety of cloud back-ends, APIs, SaaSs (or PaaSs, EaaSs, etc.), and devices. Systems are more complicated and opaque than anyone back in the in-house rack days could have imagined. In order to even understand what’s happening in IT, organizations must adopt modern metrics systems and code tracing … apps that measure your apps so that you can better understand your apps.

No wonder “agile” and “continuous delivery” are aspirations that operate on a spectrum. You might deliver software in no time at all, but get stuck when it comes to finding bugs. Maybe you’re good at both, but your programmers in Delhi misread your software documentation and mess up the features you wanted. Maybe you deploy your apps quickly but your marketing material always lags, creating a disconnect between the product and the description of its benefits.

Building the Assembly Line

The thing companies aspire to is an automated system that covers all possible details. It’s a matter of selecting the right apps to build a smart, sophisticated devops machine that covers the maximal range of eventualities and situations. A lot of forward-thinking organizations long ago adopted tools like Jenkins for unit tests and Debian for deployment and version control, helping fill the automation gaps where devops would otherwise be writing their own scripts.

With today’s complex cloud- and mobile systems, however, the areas that continuous delivery must touch seem to have grown exponentially. Devops has to think beyond their traditional parameters of developing and shipping code, and into automating pieces of business areas like marketing and customer support.

This is particularly true for companies looking to ship apps to the 95% of the world that doesn’t speak English as a first language. Whether in Spanish or Arabic, your customers should be able to read your help pages and resonate with your marketing videos. Your foreign devops team members should be able to understand all documentation and deployment tests. Versions should automatically update in every language, and localize for every culture. Extending continuous delivery into continuous translation is at the core of every global app’s success.

 Continuous Delivery Everywhere

Because more and more components of the modern business depend on the cloud, APIs and other pieces of the devops empire, devops must extend its eye for detail into new domains. Continuous delivery must be applied across business units and around the world. The sooner businesses put all the pieces in place, the sooner global app success will arrive.

Rob Vandenberg, President and CEO of Lingotek | The Translation Network

As President and CEO of Lingotek, Rob is driving the vision of a company that is looking to change the future of translation.

Prior to being named president of Lingotek in 2008, Vandenberg served as its Vice President of Sales and Marketing where he was a source of guidance and inspiration. Prior to Lingotek, Rob headed up several successful ventures. He was co-founder and CEO of LocalVoice.com, which was acquired by HarrisConnect in 2005. He was named Vice President of Sales and Marketing for HarrisConnect after the acquisition. Before his work with LocalVoice.com and HarrisConnect, he was one of the first 20 U.S. employees at INTERSHOP Communications, where he helped build its worldwide clientele as a top-performing Sales Executive. The INTERSHOP initial public offering was one of the most successful enterprise IPOs in US history boasting a $10B market cap.

Rob holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Economics from UC Berkeley.