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Time to move on from DevOps and continuous delivery, says Google executive.
Continuous improvement and continuous delivery (CI/CD) and DevOps may be on many peoples' minds these days, but there's nothing particularly new about the concept -- software shops should have put these concepts into action years ago. Instead, technology leaders should be now worrying about the futures of their businesses.

That's the view of Kelsey Hightower, staff developer advocate at Google Cloud Platform, who says too many IT leaders are debating how to manage IT operations and workflows, when their businesses are being hit with unprecedented disruption. "CI/CD is a done deal -- like 10 years ago it was a done deal," he said in a recent podcast with CTO Advisor's Keith Townsend. "There is nothing to figure out in that domain. A lot of people talk about DevOps, and there may be some culture changes, in number of people who can do it or are allowed to do it. For me, that is the table stakes. CI/CD, DevOps; we have to say, listen, figure it out, or go work with another team outside this company to figure it out."

The problem is IT leaders and professionals -- even in the age of cloud and serverless computing -- still think too much in terms of servers and machines, and not enough in terms of meeting the challenges of meeting business competition at a high level, Hightower continues. "We know what to do with machines; you configure and you manage that server. When the cloud first came out, people took that exact mindset, and just did it on someone else's cloud. We're stuck in this machine-based mentality, and the onset of cloud didn't fix that."