GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE OF DEVOPS AND ITS EVOLVING BEST PRACTICES

This post is based on an article published by Gleanster which describes the results of a survey based on 2381 IT practitioners from across the globe. It addressed with the following objectives related to DevOps-

• What the main driving points are for the organizations to start DevOps initiatives?
• Which practices are included in the DevOps initiatives taken by the organizations?
• How the effectiveness of DevOps in enterprises is measured?

DevOps- an ill-defined trending concept!

One of the hottest trends in IT domain is DevOps but at the same time it is also one of the most ill-defined trending concepts in the market. For some people adopting DevOps means the management of IT resources like CFEngine, Puppet or others while for other people, it is the usage of tools for the automation of the deployment of cloud based infrastructure. Some people think it as a philosophy while some others think it as a job description.

Growing demand for DevOps initiatives

DevOps is now changing with an impressive speed and this movement is led by new vendors and conferences aimed at championing DevOps initiatives across the globe. In the year 2015 many companies embraced the practices of DevOps and extended its initiatives to the areas of software delivery lifecycle which were previously untouched by the DevOps movement. Survey data showed that the web based and real time applications were strongly affected by the DevOps but there is a growing demand for starting DevOps applications to data environments and databases in general. IT managers can see efficiency improvements in the IT departments due to the existing DevOps initiatives.

IT managers can see efficiency improvements in the IT departments due to the existing DevOps initiatives.

Companies have started deploying DevOps to minimize efficiency issues in IT operations.
The next big challenge is database management!

The deployment of web applications on containers or virtual machines is often taken as granted by the organizations embracing DevOps initiatives but still there is a big portion of the market which has to fully embrace the automation and cloud based infrastructure in DevOps initiatives. 2015 was a year which extended DevOps initiatives to cover more challenging projects aimed at removing inefficiency and delays from IT. The next challenging thing for the DevOps optimization will be the databases because many respondents continue to identify the database as a gap in the DevOps initiatives.

Some important questions have to be answered!

New companies in the DevOps area are facing questions like “which cloud provider is good to use and which private cloud technology should be adopted’? The other questions which need to be answered are related to operating systems, development platforms and deployable applications definitions. A popular debate going on this area is “Are companies deploying code or containers”. Containerization is important for DevOps since it moves the responsibility of configuration management and deployment to the application developers. A popular question arising for the containerization trend in 2015 is that how it relates to the relational databases on which companies rely.

DevOps deployment has started but still uncertainty prevails

It is now safer to say that DevOps has been deployed in many of the organizations but a great deal of uncertainty is still there in the organizations. Companies with strong DevOps initiatives deploy a dedicated team of experts for DevOps initiatives while other companies distribute the DevOps responsibilities all across the IT department. DevOps is continuing to evolve different approaches and this will bring issues if the organizations settle with dedicated DevOps team. A different kind of a wall of confusion will be created there will be a transition from development driven movement to the new operations department adapting to fast moving development teams which more than decade of agile has created.

Strong emerging support to Private cloud systems

The survey sees a continued support to public cloud system but a stronger emerging support to private clouds like Openstack. This makes clear that large enterprises still feel uncomfortable using public cloud system for critical and sensitive applications. The good examples are e-commerce, healthcare and finance database systems.

Databases and Data security are the next big concerns of DevOps.

Data security is the biggest concern for all type of organizations in the year 2015. For the last 5 years data leaks, data compromises and security vulnerabilities were on the news headlines building a strong expectation that businesses should provide strong protection and stewardship of data it has been entrusted with. This survey report shows a disturbing correlation between the organizations deploying DevOps and organizations using dangerous short-cuts for organizational sensitive data from production systems. This survey concludes that databases and data security are the next DevOps requirements.

Key Findings of the survey

• Bigger organizations possess a greater inclination to the stronger definition of DevOps and they are ready to take part in an enterprise ready movement for DevOps.
• Private clouds like OpenStack have better adoption rate as compared to public cloud systems.
• Nearly 50 percent of the respondents have to wait for a week to refresh non-production environment from production environment.
• Nearly 72 percent of DevOps leaders had no access controls or audits done on the production data. This shows a great shortage of security and access control for the production data which is critical for the organization.
• 39 percent of the respondents said that getting a daily production release cycle is the next top priority for DevOps.
• Nearly 25 percent of respondents are not willing to use public clouds.
• Half of the respondents say that DevOps is led by developers while 35 percent of the respondents believe that it is a shared responsibility with operations.
• Following are the top 3 reasons for implementation of DevOps in organizations- 66%- to give fast delivery of software, 44%- Identification of bugs earlier in the system, 43%- Increase in frequency of software delivery.
• Biggest challenge for DevOps initiatives– Nearly 46 percent of the DevOps leaders believe that due to data issues testing environments are limited.

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