It's 2018, and enterprises are marching forward with DevOps. Will there be new struggles, technologies and some surprises? Contributor George Lawton asked a number of experts about the future of DevOps and what companies must prepare for. From legacy integration to DataOps, the answers may surprise you.
Future of DevOps shifts to people
In 2018, DevOps will continue to gain the interest of a growing number of enterprise organizations across a wide swath of vertical markets. Focus will shift from "What is DevOps?" to "Where and how do we start?"
To prepare, enterprises should equip their teams by training around DevOps principles, practices and competencies. Training will not only advance the skills of their practitioners but could also provide collaborative and sharing opportunities between silos. People first!
Leadership needs to focus on clearly articulating the strategic objectives of the organization and aligning those goals with their employees' personal development goals in order to create win-wins for both.
Organizations that struggle continually fail to define and communicate what success looks like to teams and measure employee productivity by only focusing on output, not outcomes. Until they start to address their incentive structures, they'll struggle to catch up in the race toward higher performance and capability.
-Barry O'Reilly, business advisor and co-author of Lean Enterprise: How High-Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale
Automating workflow with DevOps processes
Ben McCormack
Function as a service will create vast opportunities in 2018. More companies are moving their data to the cloud and entering a serverless world. They are becoming less interested in how technology works and more interested in how it can automate customer relationship management and workflow, integrate with third parties and analyze data so that people can focus more on contributing value versus monitoring infrastructure. In the future of DevOps, we'll start to see an expansion of DevOps and site reliability engineering roles and roles more focused on knowing the code.
Compliance and security concerns are the driving factors behind enterprises no longer putting up with automation gaps and missing artifacts in DevOps. Batch jobs, databases, machine learning models, data from legacy applications and everything else will have to be integrated with the DevOps pipeline in the future of DevOps.
-Torsten Volk, managing research director, Enterprise Management Associates
Unite DevOps and ITSM
In 2018, DevOps will rediscover more of the principles of IT service management, and the ITSM world will continue its enlightenment through new ideas. Coming from the ITSM side of the gap, we have the release of VeriSM, and there is promise of a new version of IT Infrastructure Library. And from the other side comes the insightful breakthrough work of theStella Report. One day, they'll meet in the middle.
-Rob England, managing director, Two Hills
Merge IT and business to compete
Efficiency might keep a company in the game, but speed is what will win it.
Carmen DeArdoTechnology Director, Nationwide
Every company needs to become an IT company first to prosper in the next decade. The future of DevOps is pushing for Agile to become end-to-end across the value stream with a focus on reducing lead time and increasing deployment frequency. As such, there will be more focus on understanding and optimizing the entire value stream from business concept to deployment and getting feedback from customers to drive continuous improvements.
Just having Agile teams and moving to the cloud are not enough if there isn't a focus on value stream architecture to improve end-to-end delivery capabilities. Efficiency might keep a company in the game, but speed is what will win it.
We see a growing trend that takes the DevOps conversation beyond the technical realm into the full value stream for end-to-end value delivery. This includes groups like marketing, sales, finance, legal, HR and more. Engaging these groups as early in the process as possible helps organizations build better solutions, while avoiding the delays that often accompany getting buy-in and approval from these traditional vertical silos.
Barry O'Reilly
Ben McCormack
Torsten Volk
