Azure Use Case – Intertech

While searching through use cases and scenarios, I absolutely fell in love with what Intertech did through the power of DevOps transformation. The fact that it used Azure is not as relevant as what it did with Azure and how it used the Azure and GitHub services to modernize and revolutionize its pipelines. This use case is all that DevOps is supposed to bring to a company in terms of value. It also addresses something that will become very relevant in the later parts of this book (where we are now): generative AI. Let’s take a look at the old Intertech workflow:

Figure 10.3 – Old Intertech workflow

This figure represents a sort of sunk cost fallacy, one that can lead to a severe loss of productivity. It represents how Intertech operated suboptimally and wasted much of their critical personnel in tasks that should have not been their concern in the first place. So, let’s look at how Intertech approaches this problem.

Let’s start with who Intertech are. They are an IT operations company that supports some of the largest business clients in Turkey with their infrastructure and operational needs. Now, you can imagine that this kind of operation would be pretty difficult to manage on a lot of levels. The pains are not very big; in fact, they are tiny cuts and pinpricks, but those are often the most annoying kinds of pain. They are irritating and distracting, and if you let them, they will steal your attention. In this section, we will talk about mental and physical anguish and how the fine people at Intertech worked to reduce it.

Scenario

Intertech worked in creating and maintaining solutions for some of the biggest companies in Turkey. Make a mental note of those two words: creating and maintaining. Those are two of the fundamental parts of developing any software solution, but they are very different from each other. To create something is to give it life; you’re giving birth, it’s painful, and it’s long, but it’s wonderful. Maintaining something is changing the diapers on the thing you gave birth to. It’s disgusting, but you are responsible for it and the toddler isn’t just going to take care of itself, no matter how prepared or independent it may be (and most toddlers are not). Keep this analogy in mind as it’ll follow us throughout the subsections. Years down the line, if I’m changing the diapers on this book to write a second edition, I will keep this in mind as well.

So, this was the difficulty facing Intertech: the balance of developing new projects while maintaining old ones. And the tasks to maintain the old ones were mundane, but they required man-hours, manpower, and a lot of power hours that could’ve been spent coming up with new ways to deliver value. The cycle of thought that runs between the initial problem and finally finding its solution requires precious time and intellectual effort that is usually significantly less than the capacity of the person solving it. Basically, it forces intelligent people to do dumb tasks.

So, when thinking about the solution to this, what should be the first thing we think of? Perhaps there is a way in which solutions can be found without having to think about and research them too much. Not, of course, for critical, vital tasks that require actual focus but for mundane tasks that require several Googles of a bunch of terms to get to the appropriate Stack Overflow page and then copying and pasting that into a solution and running it a couple of times to make sure it works. Maybe there’s a tool that will collate all of this information and generate a simple concise solution for a simple mundane problem and save us all some time. Perhaps one that rhymes with hartificial fintelligence? Alright, nothing rhymes with artificial intelligence. AI, that’s what I’m talking about.