Xebia Articles

The extended impact of enterprise DevOps | Xebia

Written by Ben Hählen | May 23, 2017 7:00:00 AM

DevOps is at the heart of successful enterprises around the world. It not only saves time and money, it adds value. Very short development stages, often no more than a few hours, benefit to the success. How can organizations reduce cost and time-to-market while still offering quality and have their developers focus on innovation? How can you identify and highlight surprising data at an early stage? That’s where DevOps software comes in. Take note of three significant DevOps Trends that organizations are facing in the future.

DevOps becomes intelligence

Analytics and monitoring in software development becomes the new, big data buzz. FutureDevOps demands analysis of information to improve and optimize decisions and performance. As enterprises automate software releases more and more, they produce larger amounts of data (like in IoT), scattering critical information over a vast array of tools. DevOps becomes Software Delivery Intelligence and will meet the requirements of Business Intelligence in the future. More Big Data features will become part of DevOps software that provides enterprises more insight into what happens during their software development process. You will be able to summarize that data clearly for business reporting, and identify and highlight unusual or surprising data for further investigation related to operations, usage, what’s working and what’s not. If that happens at an early stage it will speed up your process.

Provide developers room to focus on product innovation

Delivering software more efficiently while retaining happy top talent “Release software faster” is a strategic priority that’s critical for every business. Enterprises have the urge to measure how fast they are moving, and learn more about the business value – what’s the time to market from idea to production? This means that the operation needs more control.

On the other hand, developers need the freedom to do creative, innovative things that require strategic thinking. But in a tight market, where the demand for the best developers, programmers, testers and security professionals is growing every day, it’s not only about delivering faster. Shortage of IT staff may hit enterprise digital transformation efforts. Therefore, it matters that each developer is satisfied with the work they are doing to keep them on board. They can only grow if they are learning new things.

The second one in quick succession: developers need to have room within the process to innovate and develop their own skills. Organizations will turn to DevOps software to strike a balance between saving time and money, and delivering quality. While at the same time handling repetitive and standardized tasks so that developers can focus on product innovation.

XL Deploy has enabled us to reduce the cost of developing software, and to improve DevOps coordination. Developers can now spend most of their time on modeling and developing code, and do not have to waste time on documentation and deployment troubleshooting. XL Deploy has also enabled us to eliminate all the glitches and misunderstandings that were endemic to the manual processes.

Sander Ettema, Manager Linux Unix at Rabobank

Containerization in Agile Application Development

Containerization is not only one of the most prominent trends in IT. It’s supporting new forms of agile application development. Containers will become a primary tool for application developers leveraging microservices that can be deployed and scaled on physical systems or virtual machines (VMs). Containers will demand detailed levels of control over workload management, such as orchestration and automation. As organizations release software faster using this multitude of disparate tools it becomes a struggle to manage and control the release process at scale. Pipeline orchestration provides the crucial end-to-end automation, visibility, control and intelligence on the whole Continuous Delivery process.

DevOps software offering plugins for Kubernetes, Docker Compose, Docker and Ansible help organizations to better manage container deployments and orchestrate complex DevOps toolchains across different technology platforms and application technologies. As a result, organizations gain the insight and intelligence to understand, improve and manage the process of delivering enterprise software.

Here’s a short checklist to get ready for FutureDevOps:

  • Make sure that you are using the right application release automation tools that enable you to speed up your software delivery process
  • Stop punishing your most phenomenal developers and system integrators and start by removing all their boring tasks
  • Embrace DevOps Intelligence as it will become one of your DevOps pillars. If you can identify and highlight surprising data at an early stage, you willl speed up your process even more.

Is your Enterprise Future DevOps ready? That brings us to this pearl of wisdom, spoken by Abraham Lincoln:

If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six hours sharpening my ax.


This article is part of the Urgent Future IT Forecast 2017.

 

 Xebia DevOps