Is Devops the Future of IT -Time will tell …

                                 Is Devops the Future of IT ….Time will tell …

DevOps” has become one of the industry’s latest go-to buzzwords. DevOps is nothing new. It’s been popularized through a series of DevOpsDays conferences that started in 2009 in Europe , and the term “DevOps” was in common use online by the spring of 2010. I should say 2015 was very important year for the Complete DevOps. Not only the momentum was picked up by the enterprise for DevOps, big platforms players like RedHat made their entry into DevOps by buying Ansible , this shows that the future is bright. It’s been more than a decade to me in ALM /SDLC market. The journey till now is really great, & I am really excited to see how fast the IT community & Enterprise had embrace DevOps.

How do you define DevOps? DevOps is the continuation of this journey, beginning from product management, development and QA and all the way into IT operations, where value is delivered to customers. DevOps practices enable fast flow of features from development into IT operations, while preserving world-class availability, reliability and security.

So, let me take my best shot at describing DevOps, and why I think it will change the way of IT moving forward. DevOps combines development and operations engineers into a cross-disciplinary community dedicated to the complete lifecycle of the systems being developed and used, while evolving agile software development processes along the way to deliver this to scale.

Second-day operations utilize the same tools employed by the developers, as more of the daily support and operations of infrastructure are replaced by automated processes. DevOps is not something you just implement, but rather a journey along the IT way.

In my opinion based on the Agile Manifesto, there are four aspects of Agile Development: Values, Principles, Methods, and Practices, all of which have evolved along the way to make up the current DevOps philosophy and concepts. 

Advantages of DevOps as a philosophical stance include the breaking down of IT silo barriers and the return to the collaborative efficiency of different disciplines’ working directly together at each phase from inception to completion. I see a future in which coding is the common thread between teams, which are organized by areas of functionality. This won’t change overnight, but I do believe the sails have been deployed and this ship is tacking into the winds.

Devops is a movement that is underway or at least in the very early stages of infancy as a way to rid the IT world of some if not most of its silo’s.  Silos have existed in Information Technology (IT) from the beginning for two reasons, the complex nature of early IT systems and because that’s the way businesses are run, for the most part.  Silo’s are an easy way for Accounting to make sense of business operations, for example, marketing only does marketing activities, sales does sales, distribution does distribution, etc.  So fast forward to today’s IT environment where Agile is taking hold and become more prevalent, where IT systems are becoming more complex, where news reaches the rest of the worlds in seconds not days or weeks.  Large scale failures and inefficiency is becoming not only way of life, in some people’s eyes it’s the norm in IT.  Devops is an attempt to correct this: Will it succeed?  Time will tell. 

Could small strike groups of different DevOps teams be responsible for the complete life cycles of different systems, or will we have larger teams to collaborate with? In my opinion, the smaller teams will be in the best position to be more agile, but no concept is set in stone. It will be interesting to see how DevOps shapes the future of IT.