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Micro Focus 2018 Predictions: The Year That DevOps Shifts its Focus from Dev to Ops

VMblog Predictions 2018

Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2018.  Read them in this 10th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Mark Levy, director, Strategy, Micro Focus

The Year That DevOps Shifts its Focus from Dev to Ops

Over the last eight years, most DevOps practices have focused mainly on increasing the speed and quality of software delivery.  According to Puppet's 2017 DevOps Report, IT organizations that use DevOps practices, such as continuous delivery, are able to deliver software into production on average 46 times faster than their peers, accelerating deployments to several times a day.  Deployment pipeline automation is being adopted quickly, but as this constraint is removed, another appears. As software is deployed faster and more frequently, how does Ops support, manage, and keep up with the ever-increasing demand for its services?  

While the wall between Dev and Ops has been crumbling, implementing DevOps practices on the Ops side is still a work in progress.  The rapid adoption of Continuous Delivery is putting the squeeze on Ops.  As Dev goes faster and becomes more agile, Ops is still trying to lock things down for availability, security, audit, and compliance. This is the classic cultural conflict as Dev is paid to accelerate change while Ops is paid to mitigate risk. The Ops teams in large enterprise IT organizations are still considered to be a constraint, but in 2018 they will transition from managing change to enabling change.

In 2018, we will see Ops organizations start to transition from their core strength of protecting the business to enabling the business. The focus will shift to an agile culture, prioritizing business value over optimizing IT costs, where quality and time-to-value will become everyone's priority. As a result, this will pull Ops to the left in the delivery lifecycle as the requirement for reduced cycle times will require a more collaborative relationship with Dev.

While time-to-value will pull Ops to the left, DevOps principles and practices established in software development will shift to the right and onto the management of the IT infrastructure.  Principles and practices, like automation, version control, and agile techniques, will be a requirement for Ops teams moving forward.  Ops organizations will replace fragile, complex, and static systems and provide a programmable service platform, driven by automation, that provides self-service functions, on-demand, for its customers.

As noted by Forrester, 2018 will be the year that the enterprise scales DevOps practices. This is the year that Ops transforms from a passive tactical enabler managing change to a true DevOps partner enabling change.

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About the Author

Mark Levy 

Mark is director of Strategy at Micro Focus, providing insight into how modern software practices such as Agile and DevOps enable large enterprise IT organizations to build and deliver software faster and with less risk.  Over the last 25 years, Mark has held marketing, product management, and product development positions focusing application development, service, availability, and performance management. Mark speaks and writes on modern software practices from mainframe to mobile and is the host of the webinar series the "DevOps Drive-in" where he interviews industry thought leaders on topics such as DevOps best practices, culture and high performance IT.

Published Wednesday, January 17, 2018 7:15 AM by David Marshall
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