Three DevOps trends to look out for in 2016
As we start to wrap up this year, we’ve been looking at the major business and technology trends we see taking shape in 2016.
Our first post on predictions focuses on DevOps – how we integrate development and operations teams to drive faster and more efficient applications to the business, and to our customers. Next year, Gartner predicts that DevOps will become a mainstream strategy, used by 25 percent of Global 2000 organizations worldwide. The benefits of DevOps are apparent – IT organizations can drive faster delivery of features, continuous software delivery, and a host of other advantages from successfully merging development, QA and IT operations.
At Replicon, we’re trusted by our thousands of customers worldwide to house their critical time, expense, client, project and resource information to help them continue to drive efficiencies and profitability across all aspects of the organization. Whether it’s a small business with a highly mobile workforce, or a multinational corporation with teams collaborating on projects in multiple office locations, this data is the catalyst for empowering people to optimize how they spend their time, and providing the insights to successfully grow their business. We talk about time as the one function that, if harnessed effectively, delivers significant value to the organization.
Our engineering and operations team is focused on building the foundation for this data, our products and innovations for our customers. And we’ve found that a critical piece is in establishing and maintaining DevOps strategies that lead teams through complex delivery, and influence them towards advanced engineering practices. One of our goals is to create a fully automated, scalable and nimble infrastructure for our customers, and this has manifested itself by migrating our customers to AWS datacenters around the globe – including multiple locations in the US, EMEA and APAC. The migration serves as the infrastructure for us to drive further automation and continuous delivery for next year and beyond.
Based on the inroads we’ve made this year with DevOps and what we’ve been seeing evolve in the industry, here are our top three predictions for where we see the market headed in 2016.
1. There will be an increase in modular approaches to system building. Previously, IT organizations have created monolithic products for their customers. However, the best practice today is to employ nimble and small teams to take care of individual applications. While this can sound dysfunctional, companies that will thrive will embrace the chaos to drive future growth.
2. There will be further advances in programmable infrastructure/Infrastructure as a Code. The idea of automating things is not new, but the ability to provision web servers easily and seamlessly is. Thanks to higher acceptance of DevOps and the open source software movement, infrastructure can be programmed so that a team can develop the software and operate its environment at the same time. In 2016, companies will continue to push more agile, software-based methods of operating the infrastructure.
3. Developers will take more ownership of the entire product lifecycle. As DevOps-ready tools see more adoption and out-of-the-box functionality, the traditional silos between developers and operations will whittle down. Teams are focusing on continuous delivery and continuous improvement, which means greater accountability and ownership from developer teams to build and run their solutions next year.
While DevOps has not yet achieved mainstream adoption, for IT organizations to be successful next year, an agile methodology is critical to drive continual product innovation. Pioneers such as Amazon and Netflix continue to push the envelope in upending traditional processes – and companies that can drive a culture that unites its people, processes, workflows and technologies will gain the right base for DevOps to thrive. DevOps movement is a prime example of how fusing previously disparate functions can bring about tangible returns to the business.
Do you agree with these trends? What other opportunities are you seeing to drive DevOps success?
