
Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2014. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Rajat Bhargava, co-founder and CEO of JumpCloud Inc.
Predictions in 2014 for DevOps and the Cloud
2013 seemed to be the
year that DevOps has come into its own
and get recognized as a serious movement. Here are some of our predictions on
how that might continue into 2014.
1 - Enterprise will
start to get on the DevOps bandwagon. Just as with Agile software
development practices, large corporations are going to start seeing the
benefits startups and small companies find with the DevOps movement and will
want to capitalize on that themselves. We predict they will implement it with
the speed and efficacy that they have when attempting to practice Agile, that
is, not all that well. New projects will benefit earliest, as will
re-systemization efforts: these will be easiest to automate operations tasks as
they're built, similar to a startup environment. Legacy systems will be the
most difficult to move to a DevOps mindset, and it will be an uphill battle to
convince management to make the investment to make that change versus the status
quo.
Also factor in
entrenched and more traditional IT teams, who will be forced to change or lose
their jobs entirely as barriers to DevOps in the enterprise.
2 - Rise of the
(ephemeral) machines. Immutable servers are a talking point we're
hearing more of - a virtual system is spun up, configured using an automated
configuration tool and let to run with minimal to no direct contact from
operations. Some servers don't even have a way to login at all - they're
completely autonomous. While this is attractive and useful for (some)
production environments we think that it's fairly impractical for many
companies. The ability to login, take measurements, experimentally tweak the
environment and get instantaneous feedback is just too valuable -- not to mention
that this approach basically just moves the configuration overhead from the
running systems to the base image management. Nonetheless, expect to see more
talk of immutable servers in the coming year.
3 - Companies will start
outsourcing their DevOps. While the philosophy of DevOps is that the product does best when
developers are intimately involved in the deployment and maintenance of the
production environment this doesn't mean that they need (or want... or can be)
experts in that area. There are companies coming into play which assist in this
area - VictorOps in
the area of 'pager duty', email delivery through 'SendGrid', continuous deployment strategies managed by companies like
'CodeShip', ongoing management of servers via JumpCloud, and monitoring via NewRelic. We've seen in the past decades the
componentization of software - through open source libraries that allow
companies to focus on their core competencies. Today, we're seeing the Internet
continue that drive to increase productivity by not only relieving the need to
code those functions, but by actually making massive scalable infrastructures
available to programmers that they can use without worrying about how that
infrastructure is maintained or scaled - if they can afford it.
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About the Author
Rajat
Bhargava currently serves as co-founder and CEO of JumpCloud Inc., a provider
of management and security tools for DevOps and IT professionals. An MIT
graduate with over a decade of experience in industries including cloud,
security, networking and IT, Mr. Bhargava is an eight-time entrepreneur with
four exits two IPOs, two trade sales and four companies still private.