| | JUNE 20188CIOReviewThe traditional definition of application management is being challenged by recent developments in application technology as well as changes in software development approaches. These challenges require us to broaden the meaning of application management beyond just the operation of a runtime environment.First, the advent of scaled agile framework (SAFe), microservices architecture, advances in software configuration management, robust test automation tools, and container runtimes allow us to decompose monolithic applications into fine grain services that increase reusability. They also reduce the risk of continuous integration and deployment into production.In order to achieve these benefits, the complete lifecycleideation, requirements, development, test, deployment, and operationsmust change. We can no longer think of application management as simply managing a monolithic application at runtime. Moving forward, an application will be a collection of distributed microservices. We must ensure the right microservices are defined through deeper collaboration. This includes business clients on one end of the spectrum and operations teams on the other, thus truly integrating agile with DevOps principles. This includes:· Transitioning architects from being application-focused to business-domain focused· Defining best practices to help train developers and ensure microservices provide their desired functionality· Providing robust development, software configuration, and test automation to achieve continuous deployment into production and reduce time to market· Implement more robust operations tooling to simplify the management of a more distributed environment and highly decoupled microservicesSecond, the growth and acceptance of enterprise class open source communities is another factor impacting application management. We must actively participate in and contribute to these communities to not only ensure our required capabilities are delivered, but also see that the community thrives in order to maximize benefit. Strong DevOps leadership within these communities is necessary to achieve this result.The open source projects should address the functional needs, as well as application management and operational needs. Quite often that is not the case and we are participating in communities to ensure they are thinking about the runtime environment and operative needs as much as delivering new application functionality. In return, we must integrate planning and delivery cycles to align with the release of open source. We are working with various software development parties to move to more co-create models where we work together to deliver needed capabilities at a lower cost that can be contributed to open source communities.Third, the maturation of cloud computing has removed much of the operational concerns that traditionally APPLICATION MANAGEMENT TRANSFORMEDBy Sorabh Saxena, CIO, Network & Shared Services, AT&TSorabh Saxena
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