Industry Perspective
How Automation Helped Modernize One Agency’s Culture An interview with Christopher Rice, Senior Solutions Architect, Red Hat Sometimes it’s easy to overestimate the change we hope
The culture change was almost immediate. We could
technology can bring. From an agency perspective, for
see it. It just started rolling. Different divisions inside
example, implementing a new tool doesn’t necessarily
the agency started coming in and asking what we
mean existing performance impediments, such as silos or
were doing. So we actually started bringing on the
a disempowered workforce, will go away.
applications teams.
But at one agency, automation and containerization
Now, the operations guys are talking to the app guys
proved to meet the mark and actually helped transform
about how they’re integrating their automation into
intra-agency collaboration for the better. These two
the same process of getting servers out and providing
capabilities not only helped modernize IT but the agency’s
services to the end customer. Everybody is talking the
culture as well.
same language, and it melted walls without having to
Christopher Rice, now Senior Solutions Architect at
spend a lot of effort doing it.
Red Hat, worked at this agency as a lead architect.
Our entire 30-day process afterwards took us down to
Rice told GovLoop the story of how automation and
30 minutes, with no human hands, fully secured and
containerization helped the agency “melt walls” and take
fully automated.
a 30-day process down to 30 seconds. (The text has been edited lightly for clarity and length.)
First, Automation: 30 Days to 30 Minutes This agency was as stovepiped as an agency can get. The Windows team only did Windows, the network team only did networks, and so on. Nobody talked to each other.
Next, Containerization: 30 Minutes to 30 Seconds It was stellar. Under a year, we were able to change 30 days to 30 minutes. Now, that same agency is taking 30 minutes to 30 seconds with OpenShift containers. Containers are significantly smaller. They’re much easier to attach the storage and deploy your applications on. But not only are they going to build a
It would take us 30 days between processes,
server within 30 seconds – they’re also going to make
procedures, red tape, scripts, engineering time and
that application cloud-ready through containerization,
human hands to build a single server — even if it was
and they can utilize it whether it’s in AWS or Azure.
virtual. Thirty days.
Now, the infrastructure guys have the option to use
We were approached by Red Hat to try the Ansible
hybrid cloud. And they’ve been able to bring it down
automation platform, Ansible Tower, and we gave it a try.
from what would take 30 days to 30 seconds, which I
Within two years, we had a single automation platform
think is phenomenal.
that the Windows and Linux teams were fully utilizing. What this meant was that we still needed subjectmatter experts for Windows and Linux. But the Windows guy could talk to the Linux guy in the same language when they were asking for help.
Agency of the Future: Common Misconceptions Holding You Back and How to Break Free | 29
