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.
Part 1 is published here.
Key technology adoptions that enable DevOps will take off
Because DevOps is still in the beginning stages of adoption, there are few defined tool chains for DevOps and no accepted single standards. However, as organisations increasingly learn and share success from their DevOps practices, this will start to change in 2016, with a few key technology concepts helping IT maximise speed and quality throughout the software development lifecycle.
Increasing automation
Automated testing, infrastructure, and application deployments speed up cycles and reduce errors. This is particularly important for decreasing cycle times in the software delivery lifecycle. As enterprises look to adopt DevOps, the first few wins from a technology tool chain perspective will occur through the adoption of automation that will accelerate tasks, eliminate manual handoffs, and cut down error-prone processes.
Decreasing latency
As organisations move to increase the pace of application delivery, they must look carefully at each lifecycle stage and identify and remove the biggest hurdles that impede rapid, high quality delivery cadence of software releases to customers. You can make significant progress by initially identifying the biggest bottlenecks in the “conveyer belt” delivery pipeline. It’s not particularly useful to remove smaller bottlenecks first because the major obstructions can still cause technical “debt” to build up earlier in the pipeline or reduce key resources further down in the pipeline.
Enabling visibility
For high quality applications to be delivered at a rapid pace from inception to the hands of end users, it is important to continuously assess and monitor them at every stage of the lifecycle. You must measure and analyse key metrics such as application user experience, the health and availability of the application and infrastructure, and threat and risk monitoring, sharing them across the team through continuous feedback loops. As you gather these metrics, it’s critical to measure them against the metrics that the company demands. If they don’t meet the business needs, you must then improve and iterate, making constant forward progress.
Job roles will evolve
Most IT organisations’ adoption of DevOps will force everyone to learn new skills – not just from a technical perspective, but also from a cultural one. As developers become more familiar with infrastructure, and operations staff gets more familiar with code, it’s inevitable that jobs will begin to evolve. Beginning in 2016, those changes will stretch beyond development and operations to impact business analysts, planning teams, and even C-level executives. For example, traditional system administrator roles will become less relevant as automation takes over many tasks, while “full-stack” engineers, who are familiar with the entire application technology stack, will start to become more critical. Roles will transform as teams become more horizontally embedded around products and services, and multiple roles become part of the extended DevOps delivery chain.
Conclusions
In the digital revolution where software will determine business leadership in the marketplace, it’s critical that enterprises understand the power of DevOps to help deliver higher quality software faster. DevOps is no longer a fringe movement or even simply an idea for so-called “unicorns.” It’s the way enterprise IT must operate to compete and stay relevant in the marketplace. Armed with these predictions, you can be ready for the changes to come – and take steps to be among the innovators, not those left behind.
Edited from source by Cecilia Rehn.
Source: Hewlett Packard Enterprise
