Growth of DevOps

The adoption of DevOps practices by global organizations has become mainstream, according to many recent industry studies. For instance, a late 2016 study, conducted by IDG Research for Unisys Corporation of global enterprise organizations, found 38 percent of respondents had already adopted DevOps, while another 29 percent were in the planning phase, and 17 percent in the evaluation stage. Adoption rates were even higher, 49 percent versus 38 percent, for larger organizations with 500 or more developers.

Another recent 2017 study by Red Gate Software, The State of Database DevOps, based on 1,000 global organizations, found 47 percent of the respondents had already adopted DevOps practices, with another 33 percent planning on adopting DevOps practices within the next 24 months. Similar to the Unisys study, prior adoption rates were considerably higher, 59 percent versus 47 percent, for larger organizations with over 1,000 employees.

Emerging Technologies

Although DevOps originated to meet the needs of Agile software development to release more frequently, DevOps is no longer just continuous integration and continuous delivery. As more organizations undergo a digital transformation and adopt disruptive technologies to drive business success, the role of DevOps continues to evolve and expand.

Emerging technology trends, such as Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Internet of Things (IoT/IIoT), serve to both influence DevOps practices, as well as create the need for the application of DevOps practices to these emerging technologies. Let’s examine the impact of some of these emerging technology trends on DevOps in this brief, two-part post.

Mobile

Although mobile application development is certainly not new, DevOps practices around mobile continue to evolve as mobile becomes the primary application platform for many organizations. Mobile applications have unique development and operational requirements. Take for example UI functional testing. Whereas web application developers often test against a relatively small matrix of popular web browsers and operating systems (Desktop Browser Market Share – Net Application.com), mobile developers must test against a continuous outpouring of new mobile devices, both tablets and phones (Test on the right mobile devices – BroswerStack). The complexity of automating the testing of such a large number mobile devices has resulted in the growth of specialized cloud-based testing platforms, such as BrowserStack and SauceLabs.

Cloud

Similar to Mobile, the Cloud is certainly not new. However, as more firms move their IT operations to the Cloud, DevOps practices have had to adapt rapidly. The need to adjust is no more apparent than with Amazon Web Services. Currently, AWS lists no less than 18 categories of cloud offerings on their website, with each category containing several products and services. Categories include compute, storage, databases, networking, security, messaging, mobile, AI, IoT, and analytics.

In addition to products like compute, storage, and database, AWS now offers development, DevOps, and management tools, such as AWS OpsWorks and AWS CloudFormation. These products offer alternatives to traditional non-cloud CI/CD/RM workflows for deploying and managing complex application platforms on AWS. Learning the nuances of a growing list of AWS specific products and workflows, while simultaneously adapting your organization’s DevOps practices to them, has resulted in a whole new category of DevOps engineering specialization centered around AWS. Cloud-centric DevOps engineering specialization is also seen with other large cloud providers, such as Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

Security

Call it DevSecOps, SecDevOps, SecOps, or Rugged DevOps, the intersection of DevOps and Security is bustling these days. As the complexity of modern application platforms grows, as well as the sophistication of threats from hackers and the requirements of government and industry compliance, security is no longer an afterthought or a process run in seeming isolation from software development and DevOps. In my recent experience, it is not uncommon to see IT security specialists actively participating in Agile development teams and embedded in DevOps and Platform teams.

Modern application platforms must be designed from day one to be bug-free, performant, compliant, and secure.

Security practices are now commonly part of the entire software development lifecycle, including enterprise architecture, software development, data governance, continuous testing, and infrastructure as code. Modern application platforms must be designed from day one to be bug-free, performant, compliant, and secure.

Take for example penetration (PEN) testing. Once a mostly manual process, done close to release time, evolving DevOps practices now allow testing for security vulnerabilities to applications and software-defined infrastructure to be done early and often in the software development lifecycle. Easily automatable and configurable cloud- and non-cloud-based tools like SonarQube, Veracode, Qualys, OWASP ZAP, and Chef Compliance, amongst others, are frequently incorporated into continuous integration workflows by development and DevOps teams. There is no longer an excuse for security vulnerabilities to be discovered just before release, or worse, in Production.

Modern Platforms

Along with the Cloud, modern application development trends, like the rise of the platform, microservices (or service-based architectures), containerization, NoSQL databases, and container orchestration, have likely provided the majority of fuel for the recent explosive growth of DevOps. Although innovative IT organizations have fostered these technologies for the past few years, their growth and relative maturity have risen sharply in the last 12 to 18 months.

No longer the stuff of Unicorns, platforms based on Evolutionary Architectures are being built and deployed by an increasing number of everyday organizations.

No longer the stuff of Unicorns, such as Amazon, Etsy, and Netflix, platforms based on Evolutionary Architectures are being built and deployed by an increasing number of everyday organizations. Although complexity continues to rise, the barrier to entry has been greatly reduced with technologies found across the SDLC, including  Node, Spring Boot, Docker, Consul, Terraform, and Kubernetes, amongst others.

As modern platforms become more commonplace, the DevOps practices around them continue to mature and become specialized. Imagine, with potentially hundreds of moving parts, building, testing, deploying, and actively managing a large-scale microservice-based application on a container orchestration platform requires highly-specialized knowledge. The ability to ‘do DevOps at scale’ is critical.

Legacy Systems

Legacy systems as an emerging technology trend in DevOps? As the race to build the ‘next generation’ of application platforms accelerates to meet the demands of the business and their customers, there is a growing need to support ‘last generation’ systems. Many IT organizations support multiple legacy systems, ranging in age from as short as five years old to more than 25 years old. These monolithic legacy systems, which often contain a company’s secret sauce, such as complex business algorithms and decision engines, are built on out-moded technology stacks, often lack vendor support, and require separate processes to build, test, deploy, and manage. Worse, the knowledge to maintain these systems is frequently only known to a shrinking group of IT resources. Who wants to work on the old system with so many bright and shiny toys being built?

As a cost-effective means to maintain these legacy systems, organizations are turning to modern DevOps practices. Although not possible to the same degree, depending on the legacy technology, practices include the use source control, various types of automated testing, automated provisioning, deployment and configuration of system components, and infrastructure automation (DevOps for legacy systems – Infosys white paper).

Not specifically a DevOps practice, organizations are also implementing content collaboration systems, like Atlassian Confluence and Microsoft SharePoint, to document legacy system architectures and manual processes, before the resources and their knowledge is lost.

To be Continued

In a future post, we will look additional emerging technologies and their impact on DevOps, including:

• Big Data
• Internet of Things (IoT/IIoT)
• Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Machine Learning
• COTS/SaaS

Illustration Copyright: Andreus / 123RF Stock Photo