Five Factors Accelerating DevOps Adoption

Every company that delivers software or relies on software to deliver its products or services requires a faster way to deliver quality working software- DevOps makes this possible. Defusing a late, buggy piece of code by retiring legacy approach to development is emerging as a differentiator to stay competitive. This is further fueling the prominence of DevOps methodologies as across organizations which until recently was seen as a common practice in Start Up world. So, what are factors driving DevOps adoption?

Apart from Speed, Scale and Economics, I believe there are 5 main factors that are contributing to the movement.

Shift from Monolithic to Micro-services Architecture: Container’s are acting as a catalyst to drive this shift. With growing evidence on benefits to install, run and maintain applications and their surrounding environments quickly, consistently, and more efficiently than their hypervisor counterparts is complimenting this movement. Architecture's optimized for better portability enabling applications to perform with low resources,mitigating the risk of buggy code deployment is a key enabler of DevOps. It might take some time before we see containers widely deployed and be a credible threat to hypervisors in the enterprise, but right now they are one of the driving forces accelerating DevOps adoption.

The Growth of Agile Movement : The agile practice seeks to mitigate the issues due to late, infested and large software. By promoting the concept of iterative, incremental changes to code, agile development is on a fast growth phase, in turn fueling the DevOps movement. Organizations come to terms with the prize they are paying for long iterative process resulting in delivery of wrong functionality or excess functionality. This is paving way for organizations to embrace agile as a preferred methodology for modern application development. DevOps stems from agile and enables ability to provision production likes stack to perform automated testing through push button deployment powered by continuous integration tools. This ability to merge new code with main code base is proving to a catalyst in adoption process.
Based on what many of us refer as a fluid characteristic, it empowers the modern day developer to be an innovative risk taker, curious and business centric.

The Operations Paradigm Shift: The key performance indicator of the Ops team is to keep the infrastructure running reliably to serve the business needs. With constant code churn, mitigating the risk of system failure due to new code changes is paramount. By embracing the concept of continuous delivery, operations is realizing the value of giving developers the ability to test code in an environment that closely resembles production conditions.
With tools for automated configuration and configuration management maturing , gives the operations side of DevOps more flexibility and confidence to enable developers to turn on their own testing environments quickly and ensuring it closely matches with the production environment.

The Rise of Modern Developer(s): With a blend of curiosity and exploratory attitude the modern day developer is seeking friction free access to infrastructure resources enabling faster deployment of quality code. DevOps helps empower the modern day developer to be an innovative risk taker, experimental and business centric. With features such as Automation, push based deployment and ability to release deployable code frequently is not only help developer’s being more productive but also, enabling a sense of satisfaction with no quality code left alone philosophy.

Cloud: With initial perceived value of easy provisioning of resources to perform basic use cases like Dev/Test, the maturity of cloud as an enabler of powerful resources at a commodity price has further contributed to the adoption of DevOps. It shares common set of perceived benefits which organizations can relate to including: driving cost efficiencies, resource utilization and most importantly faster time to deploy/time to market. This provides a compelling rationale for organizations to put the power Cloud to support DevOps adoption.  As Platform as a Service becomes more prominent, Cloud could further help faster adoption of DevOps methodologies.

Nitin Saxena

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