DevOps – Just a Buzz or a Reality?
In today’s marketplace race is for rapid product improvement on a continual basis to meet customer needs and respond quickly to market shifts. It is no longer acceptable to wait 12–18 months for a feature in the next release & this is putting tremendous pressure on traditional enterprise IT to innovate and release new software much more rapidly. The DevOps movement arose out of the critical need for organizations engaged in software development to respond more rapidly to change – “DevOps is a software development approach which synthesizes development and operations to enable agility”.
Gartner believes that DevOps is a culture and a collection of practices, such as the agile movement but lacking the benefit of a manifesto and clear set of principles and the corresponding key contributors to support the automation of delivering software and infrastructure changes or to support continuous delivery. Its foundation remains focused on adoption of agile and lean methodologies, and a collaborative relationship between development (Dev) and operations (Ops), with a singular goal of a timely, successful application production rollout.
Kurt Bittner VP at Scrum.org posted a blog in which he wrote Agile and DevOps are not really separate things. Agile has always embraced excellence in engineering principles. Having to deliver and support applications in production expands that focus. Doing so at significantly faster cycles means that automation is now an even more important part of those engineering practices.
In reality Developers have embraced Agile software development to create better software faster. But improved software only benefits the organization when it is made available to customers. This generates pressure on Ops teams to deploy more frequently, and thus the genesis of the DevOps movement.
DevOps seeks to optimize processes and procedures not for any one stage but for the whole delivery chain– across the entire software delivery lifecycle, from the request for a new product or feature all the way through deploying it in production.
The goal of agile software development is to have a piece of working software at the end of each iteration. DevOps naturally extends this definition of “done” to include having the software actually running in production. With agile delivery and DevOps, new software is deployed frequently that it is almost continuous. Through continuous deployment, the fragile pieces of the system get improved or weeded out, contributing to greater reliability and higher quality.
ACL Digital has been focused on helping companies to better align IT so as to maintain rapid product improvement on a continual basis, a strong supporting platform and a culture that can establish agile delivery through DevOps. Thus organizations innovate rapidly and respond quickly to market shifts with full governance.