4 Reasons Why DevOps is the Future: Are You Ready for DevOps?

Introduction

Today, we are in the year 2021 and DevOps hardly needs any introduction. The pandemic has driven numerous organizations to realize their innovations faster and focus on their software development, internal processes, and business level strategies for a swifter innovation. If you are deeply affected by the volume of projects, compulsions in delivery demands for constant change, and a continuous flow of development and configuration migrations, you probably need DevOps. Time is not yet lost though, and it is never too late to adopt something, especially change.

DevOps can not only help you specify, design, build, maintain, deploy and host applications but also enhance your ability to deliver on business requirements. According to the State of DevOps Report, high-performing IT organizations have 200 more frequent deploys, recover 24 times swifter from failures, have a 3x lower change failure rate and 2,555 times shorter lead times.¹ Moreover, employees in high-performing organizations are twice as likely to recommend their organization to a known contact as a great place to work resulting in attracting top talent with great ease. High performers spend 22% less time on unplanned work and rework, and 50% less time on solving security issues compared to low performers.²

Some industry experts link the chances of cloud success directly to DevOps. In the long-term, no big organization will be able to deploy a public, private or hybrid cloud application set without DevOps. Without DevOps, it’s very difficult for organizations to manage cloud applications through the typical change-state-release lifecycle with satisfactory levels of staffing.

Organizing your organization around the use of DevOps in the cloud generally means eliminating organizational layers and simplifying roles. Organizations need a plan to hire the right people to scale up their staff as they migrate to DevOps and the cloud.

4 Reasons Why DevOps is the Future

Reason#1: DevOps is People, Business is Technology

As organizations move ahead with their digital transformations, they soon realize that the human and technology sides of the business become extremely synchronized. A ‘DevOps First’ strategy is a pivotal part of the organizational context for digital transformation.

DevOps drives better software faster, but it is not really about technology at all. The most vital thing is that DevOps is predominantly about people than about tools and technology. You should execute your plan swifter as slow change generally does not work. Though digital transformation is powered by software, it must be customer-driven. In today’s highly competitive and digital world, it is inevitable for every business to also be a software business. If you wish to create a competitive advantage with software, then it requires software development to become a core competency. Mastering the convergence of innovation and speed-to-market will make the winners stand out from the rest of the competition.

Today, we can consider ‘Cloud First’ as a given for organizations as they become software businesses. To achieve the core competency, it’s indispensable for organizations to be ‘DevOps First’ as well. Competitive advantage is derived by a balance between the two.

Reason#2: DevOps and Agile are Siamese Twins

While several people tend to view agile and DevOps methodologies as incongruous and even antagonistic to each another, the actual fact is that these two systems can often make up for the weaknesses of each another and create a more integrated work environment. They are akin to Siamese twins – complementing and supplementing each other.

The future of enterprise DevOps is likely to complement rather than demolish agile in several organizations, at least in the short-run. While agile can classify a project into individual and standardized components, the uncertainty of the larger organizational structure can usually lead to missed timelines and a dearth of communications between teams. DevOps development will possibly witness much of the internal structure of agile teams kept in place but for the addition of an operations person who can enable better communications between teams and reduce the inharmonious changeover from development to deployment that vanilla agile methodologies generally suffer from.

Reason#3: Rising Focus on Automation

DevOps is becoming an industry standard for numerous organizations. According to a report by Capgemini, 60% of organizations, in 2018, either embraced DevOps or planned to do so.³ This kind of stats proves that DevOps is an indispensable part of your business plan if you expect to respond swiftly to the market demands, enhance the time-to-market of your business, and keep your software solutions constantly up-to-date.

Several organizations wonder if automation can be incessant, on-demand, always optimal, and contextual. Smart implementation of automation implies that uninterrupted updates of the DevOps structure can happen as developers deliver content to users in spite of changes. However, it also implies that the work of DevOps is continuous. Automation is going to continue to embrace DevOps in the future. The issue sometimes is that a multitude of organizations are automating too much. As a consequence, communications are collapsing among teams.

As the industry keeps growing, more DevOps automation tools are going to be introduced. That’s where developers will require skills to understand which ones possess features worth automating and which ones need an engineer. Otherwise, organizations will find themselves implementing new things and causing problems with automation instead of making it work to their advantage.

These needs will ultimately be fulfilled by Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps). Organizations must realize that automation has reached a point of change regarding adoption and implementation. Because of this, it’s not yet included by AIOps. Consequently, it makes sense to prudently analyze how automation should be utilized to meet demands better.

‘Continuous everything’ is the future of DevOps. This implies that security, compliance, performance, usability, cost, and all other vital software elements are automatically and continuously implemented without slackening the release process. In short, the optimal DevOps process is completely automated and directly integrated with dynamic corporate demands.

Reason#4: DevOps Enables Scaling to Multi-Cloud Settings

Cloud computing is emerging as one of the principal new standards in development, and the increasingly complex tools and difficulties that isolate development and deployment means that having a DevOps pipeline in place is more vital than ever before.

As interface between the two divisions of your development cycle, DevOps is only likely to gain more importance. But more and more software is going to be compelled to depend on multiple clouds, and that will only make the tasks of DevOps professionals extremely demanding. DevOps will largely become more about addressing the dynamic technologies that propel these cloud platforms and adapting to change to ensure that their own software is optimizing them. It will also necessitate an understanding of indigenous features available on these cloud platforms and communicating them to development teams so that they can minimize labor and cut down on the work that needs to be done during deployment.

Some Stats that Validate Why DevOps is the Future

• As per the recent study, the DevOps tools market achieved $5.2 billion in 2018 is expected to reach approximately $15 billion in 2023.⁴
• Another similar study forecasts that the global DevOps market, which was $3.36 billion in 2017, is expected to reach $9.40 billion by 2023, registering a CAGR of 18.7% from 2017 to 2023.⁵
• In 2019-2020, DevOps evolved in a big way when many thought of it a few years ago as just a buzzword.⁶
• Numerous organizations are embracing DevOps and, according to Statista, there was a rise of organizations adopting DevOps from 10% in 2017 to about 17% in 2018.⁷

Conclusion

According to Grand View Research, “The global DevOps market size is expected to reach USD12.85 billion by 2025.⁸” These statistics establish the surging adoption of cloud technologies, digitization of organizations to automate business processes and growing adoption of agile frameworks. These statistics also testify how the improvement in IT teams boosts the efficiencies of operations.

The future of DevOps can be viewed as a cultural shift. It can also be described as something that integrates conventionally disjointed elements in the development, deployment, and delivery of software into a unified loop. Organizations are realizing that DevOps is rapidly taking over from their conventional IT departments. Not just the titles, but even the roles are changing. Some of the roles have been phased out, while others have been proliferated by the size of microservice architectures.

The execution of successful DevOps depends on teams communicating lucidly with one other. The future of DevOps implies minimization of physical authorizations, since automation is a massive part of the DevOps cycle.

About CloudFulcrum

CloudFulcrum with its mission of “DevOps as a Service” has been part of multiple successful Copado implementations across the globe with customers in BFSI, Health Care, Retail, Real Estate, and Technology verticals.

With our DevOps consulting, we help enterprises align their Digital Transformation goals to achieve higher efficiency, faster time-to-market, and better quality of software builds with early identification of arising issues, enabling continuous release of Salesforce applications.

¹ Nitin Tappe, “Is DevOps the Default Now and Are You DevOps Ready?” https://www.pratititech.com/is-devops-the-default-now-and-are-you-devops-ready/.
² Ibid
³ Nick, ‘DevOps: What is the Future of DevOps?’ https://blog.iron.io/what_is_the_future_of_devops/, June 30, 2020.
⁴ StarAgile, ‘What is Future of DevOps in 2021,’ https://staragile.com/blog/devops-future, September 21, 2020
⁵ Ibid
⁶ Op Cit. StarAgile
⁷ Ibid
⁸ Op. Cit. Nick