DevOps is certainly the most famous word in IT. This approach aims to bring “devs” and “ops” closer together by facilitating communication between these two populations of the IT department, which have long ignored each other – or even looked at each other as if they were fairies.
On paper, developers and operations managers have divergent interests. The former are committed to making the information system evolve as quickly as possible, sometimes to the detriment of quality. The latter, on the other hand, seek to keep the IS stable, thus slowing down deployments.
A lack of communication that leads to misunderstandings, bugs and above all delays in putting the system into production. A situation that has become untenable at a time of digital transformation and time to market.
Born around 2007 and named by Belgian engineer Patrick Debois, DevOps has since quickly gained traction. According to the latest predictions from research firm Forrester, half of all IT teams will have moved to consolidated DevOps tool chains by the end of the year.
Meanwhile, a recent survey by Redgate Software revealed that nearly three-quarters of companies had introduced DevOps in at least some projects, up from 47 percent when the study was first published five years ago.
Breaking down silos
As we’ve seen, the DevOps movement is about breaking down silos. Developers and infrastructure managers share a number of best practices and software tools in order to smooth and speed up the release process.
To run the software factory, IT professionals use collaborative tools (Slack, Microsoft Teams, Jira), Git-like source code repositories and Continuous Integration/Continuous Deliver (CI/CD) chains. These chains are made up of different open source bricks (Jenkins, Gradle, CodeShip, Buddy) or come in the form of integrated platforms (GitLab, CloudBees).
And since DevOps is becoming inseparable from the cloud, and especially from hybrid and multicloud environments, there are also Infrastructure-as-a-Code (IaaS) solutions such as Terraform and Ansible and, of course, Kubernetes, the essential orchestrator for containerized environments.
“DevOps is first and foremost a culture”
“But, more than tools or a method, DevOps is above all a culture that must allow teams to interact with each other, to integrate the daily activity of the other,” says Olivier Félis, pre-sales engineer france and BeLux at Micro Focus. “Common sense and pragmatism allow us to harmonize processes and work in harmony.
Since the approach involves many internal changes, it advises setting up change support and making each employee aware of DevOps concepts before it is implemented. The next step is to ensure that all employees can work within this common dynamic, from developers to supervisors.
The gains are there. In the 2021 edition of its Accelerate State of DevOps Report, Google Cloud shows that the most mature teams, dubbed “elites,” continue to accelerate the pace of their software production. However, they would be less stressed, as all the steps before deployment have been validated and tests are automatically generated. Teams with a true DevOps culture would have suffered half as many cases of burnout during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Scaling up and skills shortages
“While large accounts have a good level of maturity, smaller companies are still in the start-up phase,” observes Olivier Félis. “They are sometimes lost, confusing agility with DevOps.”
While the two approaches are legitimately associated, he reminds us that “you can’t be agile without being DevOps, as DevOps contributes to the acceleration of iterations. On the other hand, you can be DevOps without being agile and do, for example, the V-cycle.
Organizations are also having difficulty generalizing the approach. For Olivier Félis, while implementing DevOps in a small area is quite accessible, scaling up can quickly become a real challenge.
A growing movement
The skills shortage is also holding back companies’ ambitions. According to a recent study conducted jointly by CodinGame and CoderPad, DevOps is among the three most sought-after skills by recruiters, along with web development and artificial intelligence and machine learning.
However, the DevOps movement is expected to grow in the coming years. The approach has even made some small ones with the emergence of derivative methods, called DevSecOps and DevFinOps, which natively integrate security or financial optimization in software projects.
When will we see DevGreenOps, which would combine digital sobriety with the approach?