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 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.