DevOps, according to Gartner Inc., will evolve from a niche strategy employed by large cloud providers to a mainstream strategy employed by 25% of Global 2000 organisations by the end of 2016.
The growth of DevOps toolsets within businesses
Gartner has seen a growth of 21.1% for DevOps tools in 2015, reaching US$2.3 billion. Up from US$1.9 billion in 2014.
As predicted, DevOps-ready tools have seen a large growth in the sector and they will continue to have the largest growth potential with more organisations adopting the DevOps strategy.
Gartner believes that DevOps is a virtual, and most likely temporal, market and has defined the tools that support the strategy and the practices associated with it as being that of continuous delivery, continuous improvement, infrastructure and configuration as code etc.
Gartner categorises these tools as DevOps-ready, -enabled and -capable tools.
DevOps-enabled and -capable tools currently exist amongst, and as a part of, the larger IT operation and development toolbox, but with time to value being critical to clients, emphasis in support of DevOps has changed how these tools are being positioned in the marketplace, as well as how they are perceived.
The DevOps philosophy
DevOps is often spoken about as a philosophy, a cultural shift that merges operations with development.
“With respect to culture, DevOps seeks to change the dynamics in which operations and development teams interact,” said Ms. Wurster, Research Director at Gartner Inc. “Key to this change are the issues of trust, honesty and responsibility. In essence, the goal is to enable each organisation to see the perspective of the other and to modify behaviour accordingly, while motivating autonomy.”
Ms. Wurster added: “However, culture is not easily or quickly changed. And key to the culture within DevOps is the notion of becoming more agile and changing behaviour to support it – a perspective that has not been widely pursued within classical IT operations.”
The integration of DevOps strategies
Gartner states that people are at the centre of DevOps, but they are only a part of the overall equation needed for DevOps to be successful. Continuous improvement of the processes used within the strategy and obtaining accurate information at the right time is also necessary to optimise the value of integrating DevOps within an organisation.
It is assumed that organisations that have agile development will be slower to embrace DevOps across the board, and cultural resistance may create significant failure rates for DevOps initiatives. Although DevOps initiatives will be recognised as significant and adopted by enterprises who are looking to scale agile over the next five years.
Edited from press release by Jordan Platt
