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High-speed, high-tech, highly cool

DevOps is the new buzz on the block, only it isn't actually new. It doesn't buzz either...

By Tamsin Oxford
Johannesburg, 10 Jul 2015
Dewald Viljoen (left) and Quintis Venter, ThoughtWorks
Dewald Viljoen (left) and Quintis Venter, ThoughtWorks

The portmanteau of Development and Operations, DevOps has been around for some time. It's a bold and brilliant way of addressing the issues facing those who build software and solutions and the businesses that want to harness their capabilities. It's about speed, efficiency, innovation and capability. It's also about community, using talent to craft solutions that are agile and adaptable and infinitely more elegant than the traditional and the mundane.

DevOps evolved from the open source community and was driven by the need to make things far more capable of being reproduced and for the entire deployment pipeline to be scriptable. It's exciting, complex, dynamic and often really only truly understood by the people who immerse themselves within it. What DevOps isn't, however, is boring.

"This is a great example of a community getting together and saying, 'The current status quo just won't do, so let's fix it'," says Dewald Viljoen, software developer at ThoughtWorks. "From an open source perspective, if you subscribe to the philosophy that information wants to be free, then this is something the open source community really takes to heart, and it's also partly why DevOps has grown so quickly and in so many different directions."

DevOps is incredibly versatile, and its capability allows for 360-degree development and approaches to challenges that would normally be prohibitive in terms of manpower and cost. These are then shared with the community to allow for further development and adaptations to fit other businesses and situations.

"People take bits and pieces from various solutions, put them together into another product, and make it even more powerful or flexible," says Viljoen. "DevOps grew from people figuring out what works, what doesn't and what would work with another approach. They're learning more all the time with more and more enterprises entering the space. What makes DevOps so exciting is that we can take a technique and adapt it to whichever industry we're working in."

The popularity of DevOps has grown steadily over the past few years as it addresses significant issues - projects running late, challenges in implementation, poor performance versus investment, etc. The list of complaints that tail the industry is as long as the bugs in the code.

"DevOps is becoming popular because people can see how successfully it's been used in other businesses," says Viljoen. "From a development side, it's really cool as we like the automation aspect of it and its reliability."

Unicorns

The enterprise traditionally lags behind when it comes to new technology adoption for a number of reasons, not least of which being the need to ensure a new implementation can be seamlessly integrated throughout the organisation. However, it's becoming a requirement for the bigger business to be more agile and the IT department to go from the development to the production environment in a completely scalable way.

"Software consumers have become used to consuming software in a rapid fashion and, unlike a couple of years ago when it was fine to update your software every few months or years, what's happened is that demand for features is filtering into the business," says Clifford de Wit, developer and platform lead (DPE) at Microsoft South Africa. "We've really started to adopt agile methodologies inside businesses, and this demand has pushed developers to produce code at a much more frequent rate."

Unicorns such as Amazon, Google, Facebook and Netflix have used DevOps in such a way that they have built their business model directly off the technology architecture.

Stephen Elliot, IDC

There are organisations - the unicorns of the DevOps space - that have strapped the capability of DevOps so completely to their business models that their agility, speed and flexibility are almost the stuff of legend.

"Unicorns such as Amazon, Google, Facebook and Netflix have used DevOps in such a way that they have built their business model directly off the technology architecture," says Stephen Elliot, VP Research at IDC. "They are built for speed and it has become their competitive differentiator. Customer feedback within apps and services can be responded to very quickly and service can be adjusted in real- time. They can launch new services or adjust the old ones much faster than most traditional businesses."

Viljoen adds: "The pioneer of the DevOps movement is someone like Amazon, and all its web services come out of South Africa at the Amazon Development Centre in Cape Town. These guys wrote the book on what it means to be able to reproduce in these environments at high speed."

DevOps offers the business a number of advantages, and for Viljoen at Thoughtworks, one of these happens to be a positive impact that organisations rarely consider - job satisfaction.

"One of the most overlooked benefits of DevOps is the amount of developer job satisfaction that it generates as they gain greater control over their environment. It stops people from having to work late hours and makes them happier at what they do. It also gives them the flexibility to respond to management demand where they no longer have to put a new idea into a queue and look at it in a month. There's a lot of value for a company to have a competitive edge in getting to market fast."

This is how DevOps transforms the technical space as it allows the organisation to get its product to the web at massively improved speeds. The competition is still lagging behind while the DevOps-driven business already has its done and dusted.

"DevOps accelerates the pace of software delivery by incorporating ideas and thought leadership from both the development and operation disciplines and, as a result, it's not unusual to see new releases of an application being delivered on a daily or even hourly basis," says Grant Finnemore, MD at GuruHut.

"By enabling the rapid development and deployment of new functionality into applications, businesses can respond more effectively to market forces and experiment with ideas that can drive innovation, and defects can be fixed quickly and the consequences mitigated."

By enabling the rapid development and deployment of new functionality into applications, businesses can respond more effectively to market forces.

Grant Finnemore, GuruHut

For the mega-corporation, there is also an impressive cost benefit to being able to accurately deploy and manage solutions at speed. A project that could have cost millions just to test, without any guarantees of it being capable of working, now can be done in-house and on a nearby desktop machine.

"One of the interesting things about DevOps specifically is that there's a benefit to almost every single area of any business. It doesn't just benefit IT," says Viljoen. "The organisation can use it to focus on automation, convenient delivery, to enhance the quality of a product, shorten the feedback cycle and so much more. The business can think of a cool idea and test it really quickly to see if it will work and in which markets."

Another advantage lies in the support that DevOps offers the smaller business, thanks to its open source credo. The small group, the individual and the SME can take part in the innovation and development and add their own modifications to the pile. It allows for organisations of all sizes to adapt the solutions on offer to fit their systems and to gain access to the latest and the best in the space.

"DevOps is the oil that makes a team faster, more agile and brings so much value," says Barney Buchan, CEO of Dev2. "Your DevOps team is there to give you quality software, developed to the highest standards, as fast as possible and then delivered into the business for use. That perhaps halves the time it would have taken without a DevOps team, and you're getting twice as much value out of your development efforts. A five to ten percent gain in that space is worth millions."

This article was first published in Brainstorm magazine. Click here to read the complete article at the Brainstorm website.

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