FEATURE
THE SECRET OF DEVOPS SUCCESS WHY ENTERPRISES ARE TURNING TO DEVOPS FOR FASTER DELIVERY OF APPS AND SERVICES
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or the uninitiated, DevOps means brining ‘app development’ and ‘IT operations’ together to build and deploy enterprise software quickly and securely. DevOps was once very niche in cloud-native companies such as Facebook and Amazon and now has gone mainstream among enterprises that rely on software to run their businesses. Gartner defines DevOps as a change in IT culture, focusing on rapid IT service delivery through adopting agile, lean practices in the context of a system-oriented approach. DevOps implementations utilise technology — especially automation tools that can leverage an increasingly programmable and dynamic infrastructure from a life cycle perspective. “Software development and IT operations have never been more connected than today. This level of convergence will only continue increasing in due course and, with demands such as faster product development and enhanced deployment maintenance also sure to increase, there are several DevOps trends to watch out for in 2022. In terms of team topologies, there will 26
CXO INSIGHT ME
DECEMBER 2021
certainly be a heightened focus on organizational structure and dynamics, rather than technology and practices,” says Ayman El Sheikh, Director, Solutions Architect , MENA, Red Hat He comments DevOps will also be the driving force behind creating the right balance between stream-based and platform-based team organisation, enabling broader service resilience and reliability to enable DevOps at scale, and unlocking full cloud potential concerning elastic infrastructure, cloud service catalogue, self-services, automation, and workload migration. “Furthermore, we will likely see hybrid becoming the deployment norm and the emergence of cultural blockers focusing on cultural, organisational, and process changes,” he says. Feras Juma, IoT and Integration Solutions Manager, Software AG, says the concept of DevOps is key when entities have numerous release and operation tasks involved. In addition, extensive automation is key when it comes to DevOps; the automation of the overall delivery and all the associated repetitive tasks. “The more entities automate, the more agile, efficient, and quicker the production
cycles are and the more efficient DevOps will be. Generally, entities with highly developed DevOps would mean that most of the repetitive tasks have been automated. Therefore, as entities look to evolve and transform, the dire need for DevOps will only continue to grow,” he says. However, according to Mark Ackerman, area VP, Middle East & Africa, ServiceNow, the centre of gravity for DevOps will start moving from automation to insights. While there will be some tool consolidation, overall tool sprawl in DevOps will continue to increase, especially with individual product teams optimising for their own unique needs. This will exacerbate the need for a management layer to generate insights across various tools and teams. Engineering and product leaders will need such management platforms to understand the ROI of their investments, delivery bottlenecks, identify highperforming teams, and more. He adds there is an increasing focus on ensuring DevOps teams identify and deliver business value. Managing across DevOps teams, paired with an increased focus on AI/ML-based optimisation, will drive value stream management practices and the increased adoption of
