I recently reviewed the results of a survey measuring the State of DevOps Accountability and thought about the impact of DevOps on enterprise software in general. Then I realized DevOps is now 10 years old.
At this age, DevOps only packs a punch, if you pack your own lunch.
Companies of all sizes are trying DevOps now. The most successful projects don’t treat it like a budget line-item. DevOps isn’t for sale, nor for hire. No denying, there’s a strong DIY (do-it-yourself) aspect to DevOps.
The DevOps moniker appeared everywhere this decade, but I first heard of it in 2009 when a small “devopsdays” gathering of enthusiasts met to bridge the gap between IT Ops and development organizations. It caught on quickly from there, and the original gathering is still happening all over the world.
Then from Cameron Haight (of Gartner at the time) in a briefing soon after, came this qualification … that DevOps only exists if it is driven by customer needs, even if all vendors (such as the ITKO test/virtualization product I was marketing at the time) were vying to be part of that tool chain.
Ten years old was an interesting age for most of us humans — well past infancy, into rational thought. You took the training wheels off the bike a while ago. You have a key to the house and let yourself in if needed. You pack your own lunch. At 10, you are establishing autonomy.
DevOps at 10 is entering that age of autonomy as well. It still resembles its parents — born from agile development and continuous delivery. It still inherits the generational wealth of IT ops from redbooks to build and release automation, and continuous performance monitoring. And the influential Aunt Flo, who was a Six-Sigma blackbelt from the lean manufacturing world, stops by for karate lessons.
DevOps knows who its friends are
We’ve collectively spent billions of dollars and hours raising DevOps processes and tools — at best, on ambitious open source projects supporting DevOps, and at worst, in vendor attempts to bill themselves as the “The Leading DevOps Platform.” Caveat emptor.
Nobody’s fooled, much less DevOps at 10. It knows who its friends are.
Everyone in the DevOps movement, novice or expert, behaves with a sense of community and shares best practices. This camaraderie, even among ops and dev people working within fierce competitors, keeps DevOps autonomous from a particular technology or rigid methodology.
We can finally stop defining ‘what DevOps is,’ and start talking about what it will become.
Packing its own lunch
At age 10, you have an idea about how the world works, but you still make mistakes. You are creative beyond any adult.
DevOps is also quite immature at 10 and that’s probably a good thing.
Read any book or resource site on DevOps — and there are too many good ones to mention — each should contain a disclaimer that ‘…We are reporting on a practice that is in constant growth at the time of writing.’
Who wants a boxed lunch? Who will read about boring stuff that was baked and done as a fully mature process long ago?
[Unpaid endorsement: If you are getting started on DevOps, try Gene Kim and friends’ approachable work in The Phoenix Project (2013) and The DevOps Handbook (2016). Pictured above, Gene Kim, Jason Bloomberg and yours truly in the CA World 2015 DevOps pavilion.]
After 10 years if DevOps was rote, prescriptive methodology like ITIL, nobody would be interested anymore.
Events always provide evidence of the vitality of a movement. You see thousands of big business brown-baggers traveling to DevOps Enterprise Summits (DOES) around the world, and thousands more eating pizza and watching the free AllDayDevOps webcast, just to engage in collaboratively delivering software faster to meet customer demand.
The community is not done here. You have a massive open source development effort to improve the DevOps tool chain with check-in contributions of new test, build, release and deployment management utilities from all sides: large enterprises, leading digital-first companies as well as individual practitioners.
Continuously wondering and transforming
DevOps rides into the horizon of wide-open possibilities for continuous improvement. These improvements aren’t corporate-style KPIs, they are real shifts in customer orientation to deliver features faster, backed by a changing architectural style.
You can BYO (Bring-Your-Own) continuous infrastructure without fear. You don’t have to build it all by yourself. You have recipes. The automated architectures supporting DevOps transform at the rate of thinking in this age of autonomy.
Starting from the main course — Continuous Integration and defining Infrastructure as Code, with Continuous Delivery practices setting the heartbeat. Building from there, the environment migrates from on-premises hardware environments and VMs, to service-based architectures, then public cloud. [I’d estimate Cloud is about 15 years old now, by adolescent comparison…]
Then, hybrid IT, where the same practices can run anywhere, even back at home in a private cloud. Now for the dessert — adding another layer of abstraction with containerization, microservices and automated orchestration with Kubernetes.
All this modern infrastructure automation doesn’t rule out transformative DevOps practices on the good old mainframe. [OK, one more book recommendation demonstrating DevOps on the mainframe is Gary Gruver’s “Leading the Transformation” here.]
Did you see these transformations coming 10 years ago?
- Dedicated DevOps teams and people with “DevOps Manager / DevOps Engineer” titles.
- Since collaboration with team members and customer-oriented thinking requires empathy, job requirements often seek “soft skills” as much as technical aptitude when recruiting new team members.
- Companies have re-organized workspaces to allow more team participation, not just for Agile-style scrums, but to include Kanban-style management of features and issues, and co-located IT Operations people with developers.
- Even for remote teams, new collaborative work management tools, training resources and shared environments exist for industrializing the ‘supply chain’ of software.
- Reliability in production is just as critical as release speed, and companies have learned to incent both Dev and Ops teams for mutual success – minting a hot new role for the SRE (or, Site Reliability Engineer).
- Security has taken its place as a first-class citizen of DevOps, not an afterthought or roadblock to agility. So much so, that we often call it “DevSecOps” now.
- Some companies have accelerated from two releases a year, to two a month, to two a day or less — but the best-in-class companies measure customer value delivered, rather than obsessing over shorter cycle times.
The Intellyx Take
When will DevOps have its next growth spurt? I’m betting the age of autonomy will lead us to the promised land of Self-Serve Convenience.
It will retain some of that DIY feel in the future, and you’ll still have master DevOps chefs with cutting edge teams blazing new trails of release agility and performance.
As we enter broader adoption, I’d look for something more like a buffet-style nacho-configuration station, or a Mongolian BBQ. More automation, more options, much less to learn. Just step in and scoop out what you need.
You still make the choices. If you don’t like the food, that’ll still be on you for putting too much salt on your dish.
In short, DevOps at 10 is autonomous, and probably quite gifted, but still far from finished growing. Creativity abounds, so enjoy the next 10 years of this journey. And pack your own lunch!
Copyright ©2019 Intellyx LLC. Intellyx advises enterprises on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image source: Kanko (Flickr) open license.
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