Radical changes to computing infrastructure are ripping the rug out from under software application development. The old model of lugging an app from one department to another and finally to production is changing. A new development philosophy and new technologies are cranking up development velocity.

“The new model is, break it into small problems and then have a team own the whole thing, end to end,” said Jason McGee (pictured), IBM Corp. fellow and vice president and chief technology officer of the IBM Cloud platform. Breaking up development and allowing small teams of people full control over their own parts increases agility.

A new collection of technology tools is emerging to help these small hives do their development chores.

“It’s coming out of this realization that if a small team of people ever want to sleep, when they have to run things, they’re going to need tools to help them do that,” McGee said.

McGee spoke with Peter Burris (@plburris), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Innovation Day event in Yorktown Heights, New York. They discussed trends in speed development and enabling technologies. (* Disclosure below.)

App-first IT empowers developers

Microservices often figure into agile development of cloud-native apps. Microservices actually are more than a technology, according to McGee. “It’s really a philosophy about how to attack a problem with a group of people. It’s about how to organize,” he said.

Istio service mesh for microservices management helps development teams run things efficiently, McGee explained. It puts a lot of authority into developers’ hands and allows an application person to define policies about security. It also allows access to networking that would have been closed to all but network experts. Traditionally, only a networking expert would have had that access.

Kubernetes is an open-source platform for managing containers (a virtualized method for running distributed applications). It figures into a lot of new cloud-native development but has crossover appeal for legacy apps moving to cloud. “I actually think part of the reason why technologies like Kubernetes are so dominant right now is because they actually do a reasonable job at both,” McGee stated.

The goal of high-velocity development is to place the app at the center of IT and have surrounding infrastructure serve it.

“I think over the next five years, we’ll really get there where, as an app team, I don’t really have to think about infrastructure and I can have the system adapt to the needs of the application,” McGee concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Innovation Day event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the IBM Innovation Day event. Neither IBM, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE