DEVOPSdigest

The DevOps topic is everywhere, on almost every IT conference agenda and we start seeing a plethora of job descriptions with some kind of DevOps titles all over the recruiting websites. So, yes, DevOps is real, it is still a fairly new concept which practice is still being thought through and far from being widely adopted.

Industry thought leaders start emerging as well as books, institutes, professional associations, publications and dedicated websites. But we are still learning to crawl before we can even walk. Today, there are no formal and proven best practices available to companies willing to engage in this endeavor, they just learn as they go. The success of DevOps heavily depends on a company’s leadership vision and its ability to adopt a new culture.

What I think we will see in 2017, is an acceleration of the adoption of DevOps, especially within enterprises as the largest enterprise software companies continue developing their DevOps tool set. Adoption of DevOps will most likely be systematic for every new born-on-the-web startup company but larger companies will chose to experiment with DevOps on a small scale, within small teams before they expand to larger groups.

We should start seeing alignment between the DevOps tools, the people and the processes. From a tool standpoint, solution providers will keep on improving their solutions as quickly as they can based on the new requirements which are discovered as the practice becomes more mature.

We’ll continue to see merger and acquisitions in this space as large software companies provision their product portfolio.

Now, because DevOps is built upon the idea that better collaboration and communication produce better outcomes, we’ll see new IT communications providers (e.g. IT Alerting and ChatOps) emerge with enterprise-grade communication and collaboration platforms to address these very use cases. Again, communication is the necessary glue that binds Dev and Ops together.

From a people perspective now, new profiles will start emerging with the cross-functional skills which are now required. Therefore, I&O leaders will need to pay special attention at hiring the right talents to make these teams successful.

Finally, from a process standpoint, I believe we can and will reconcile DevOps and ITIL. DevOps will learn from ITIL, and ITIL could evolve and include the DevOps principles.

The DevOps journey is quite new and exciting and I am confident that anyone and any organization adopting this culture shift will find it extremely rewarding in the long term.