What DevOps is and why it is an important solutions development approach.
At its heart, DevOps is about bridging the divide between development and operations. As the rate of business and technological change increases incrementally, the need to streamline software design activity across development and operations becomes ever greater.
In 2008 Patrick Debois (Patrick Debois, Author at IT Revolution) and Andrew Shafer (Digital.gov — Guidance on building better digital services in government) set up a meetup session on Agile Infrastructure during an Agile conference held in Toronto, Canada. This resulted in a discussion group being formed to address the increased pace of development operations. This eventually resulted in developer events called DevOpsDays taking place. These discussions took place on Twitter, where the hashtag was eventually shortened to DevOps.
The idea behind DevOps as it relates to information technology (IT) has been around for longer than 10 years. It promotes the shift of focus in the IT industry from engineering practices that emphasise the construction of software, to ways of working that emphasise seamless alignment between both development and operations. This has led to the introduction of new source control, software automation, and delivery tooling, which aids in constructing software fast. DevOps therefore promotes shorter, more controllable iterations through the adoption of best practice, automation, and new tools.
As technology innovation continues to grow exponentially and the rate of change in most businesses also continues to accelerate, DevOps adoption will continue to grow rapidly. In a recent IDC forecast (IDC forecasts) the worldwide DevOps software market expected to reach $6.6 billion in 2022, up from $2.9 billion in 2017.
“The forces driving DevOps adoption include enterprise investments in software-driven innovation, adoption of microservices-based architectures and associated development methodologies, and increased investment by CTOs and CEOs in collaborative and automated application development and operational processes”, said IDC analyst Stephen Elliot.
DevOps drives the seamless integration of both development (Dev) and operations (Ops) teams and the acceleration of solutions by breaking each solution down into a series of functions that can be delivered in far more rapid time frames. It is organisational approach that enables faster development of applications and easier maintenance of existing deployments.
We believe that DevOps, well deployed, will remain a key factor in software engineering success for a long time to come and are very excited about the promise that DevOps holds when deployed correctly. Talk to our associates about how DevOps can transform your business.