Developers and the enterprises they work for don’t always see eye to eye. This is on display right now in companies making the transition from on-premises legacy technology to cloud and cloud-native types. A magic thread that runs through both and eliminates all friction would be ideal. For now, here are tips from a distinguished IBM Corp. engineer on easing growing pains.

There’s a trend in newer, cloud-native technology toward empowering developers and operations teams. Self-serve tools give them more autonomy to make decisions that might impact the business. Developers tend to love these new “personas.”

However, “I think from an enterprise perspective, there are issues,” said Roland Barcia (pictured), distinguished engineer at IBM.

Lots of clients want to use open-source technology and foster an open, creative environment in their organizations. However, they certainly don’t want to knock out the guard rails. They still want the proper security scans, etc., to make sure employees aren’t running amok.

Barcia recommends automating security scans, performance testing — and pretty much everything else. This allows teams to be creative without constant fear of breaking something.

Barcia spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Seattle, Washington. They discussed the break-up of traditional IT and the need for integration across new multicloud environments. (* Disclosure below.)

Testing, testing, end-to-end

Another area where there may be transitional woes is in the adoption of containers — a virtualized method for running distributed applications.

“We built tools like Transformation Advisor that will scan your WebSphere applications and tell you what you need to change in that middleware application to make it behave well in a containerized platform,” Barcia said.

Automated testing of containers all through the pipeline can smooth their transition across environments. ‘That way as I’m deploying containers, which are very dynamic along with configuration, along with policy, you’re testing it continuously. I think that level of automation is what we need to get to,” Barcia explained.

There is a growing need for integration across environments. “I think integration is kind of the next trend that we’re seeing in this multicloud space,” he said. “The new applications that we’re seeing with cognitive, data, AI are mixing data sources from multiple clouds and on-prem. And needing to control that in a hybrid control pane is key.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event. (* Disclosure: IBM Corp. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE