Predictions for DevOps in 2016 – part 1

Ashish Kuthiala, Senior Director, Enterprise DevOps Strategy, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, discusses the top 5 predictions for changes coming to the way software and services are designed, built, tested, and delivered.

Savvy businesses are using the rapid pace and malleability of software to drive more and more differentiation into the marketplace. They’re using instant feedback from users to continuously improve software. And increasingly, they’re doing this through DevOps. By ensuring close collaboration between developers and operations staff throughout the entire software development lifecycle, enterprises are becoming better at ensuring quality, maximising speed, and reacting to – or even forecasting – market changes.

In a recent report, Hewlett Packard Enterprise predicts that 2016 will bring some significant advances in the DevOps world.

Large enterprises will get onboard fully

In most large enterprises, DevOps isn’t new. Small teams are using DevOps principles to work on discrete projects, and after a few years of experimenting, they’re starting to rack up successes. But in general, DevOps hasn’t been adopted widely throughout the enterprise. As a result, software releases in the enterprise are still too slow, too buggy, and too costly.

Now that multiple teams are proving the value of adopting DevOps practices, C-level executives are taking notice and beginning to wonder whether DevOps might be an answer to some of their organisation’s top business challenges. They’re starting to engage with IT and ask how they can employ DevOps principles enterprise-wide to bring more speed and quality to business applications.

Interest at the C-level is a positive development because DevOps can’t succeed in large enterprises without executive support. DevOps requires a fair amount of experimentation and a tolerance for failure – the kind of experimentation and failure that might not be acceptable to the organisation’s leaders unless they’re confident that the eventual outcome will be worth it.

DevOps will play a central role as enterprises begin to modernise legacy applications in 2016 and beyond. Within five years, DevOps will be the norm when it comes to software development.

Standards will emerge

DevOps currently has no defined standards, so what passes for DevOps in one organisation might not look much like DevOps in another. That means DevOps entails a certain amount of risk – and large enterprises are notoriously risk averse. Even if your small teams are documenting wins, scaling out DevOps successes to the broader organisation can be a process of trial and error, which most enterprises don’t tend to engage in willingly.

As different teams experiment with DevOps and share their successes, there will be opportunities to standardise best practices gleaned from the lessons learned. Initially, the goal of standardisation will be to help mitigate the risk of scaling DevOps practices. Those new standards could involve everything from testing processes to determining the best deployment tools to how to use internal coaching across teams. Eventually, as best practices emerge and are validated, they will likely become adopted and pervasive across industries.

Security will increasingly become integrated with DevOps

All large enterprises are focused on security. Whether they learned the hard way or watched other organisations get burned, they know that problems caught by users are far more damaging than a issues caught internally before they are released into production. As the pace of software delivery increases, it poses a challenge for security teams because their primary focus is on releasing and maintaining safe and secure applications. Doing things faster doesn’t necessarily give them the needed time to thoroughly vet applications before they get into end users’ hands. The challenge lies in finding the right combination of processes that allows thorough security assessments and keeps software releases flowing at a rapid pace. Bringing security and DevOps teams together o ers a solution.

Recent high-profile incidents have made it clear that security cannot be an afterthought. Security best practices and testing must be built into the development process from the beginning – and that means making it a part of the DevOps team.

Even though some DevOps teams have already started integrating security, full integration has not yet become mainstream. In 2016 and beyond, however, security team members will become increasingly integrated into DevOps practices. Since there are currently far more developers than application security experts, security will need to coach DevOps on how to selectively and efficiently embed application security within software development, deployment, and production cycles.

You can find Part 2 here.