Top predictions for DevOps in 2016

To say that we’re living in a digital revolution has become a cliché at this point. But with every day that passes, it becomes more true. We can order taxi service, deposit checks, and lock our front door via apps on our phones. When driving, we may have no idea how to get from point A to point B without our phone’s GPS to tell us. We can buy anything—from movie tickets to groceries to shoes and TVs—on our phones, tablets, or computers. And the companies that sell these products to us can recommend exactly what we’ll want to buy next.

It’s all because of software, which has become the most important tool for businesses to find,
capture, and retain customers. Unlike a physical product, software can be changed quickly and often—and today, that’s exactly what customers expect. They can easily defect to a competitor offering a handy new feature—right after they leave a negative review about your company that could tarnish your reputation and drive away other potential users.

Savvy businesses are using the rapid pace and malleability of software to drive more and more differentiation into the marketplace. They’re using instant feedback from users to continuously improve software. And increasingly, they’re doing this through DevOps. By ensuring close collaboration between developers and operations staff throughout the entire software development lifecycle, enterprises are becoming better at ensuring quality, maximizing speed, and reacting to—or even forecasting—market changes. We predict that 2016 will bring some significant advances in the DevOps world. Here are five developments you need to know about to compete.

1. Large enterprises will get onboard fully

In most large enterprises, DevOps isn’t new. Small teams are using DevOps principles to work on discrete projects, and after a few years of experimenting, they’re starting to rack up successes. But in general, DevOps hasn’t been adopted widely throughout the enterprise. As a result, software releases in the enterprise are still too slow, too buggy, and too costly.

Now that multiple teams are proving the value of adopting DevOps practices, C-level executives are taking notice and beginning to wonder whether DevOps might be an answer to some of their organization’s top business challenges. They’re starting to engage with IT and ask how they can employ DevOps principles enterprise-wide to bring more speed and quality to business applications.

Interest at the C-level is a positive development because DevOps can’t succeed in large
enterprises without executive support. DevOps requires a fair amount of experimentation and a tolerance for failure—the kind of experimentation and failure that might not be acceptable to the organization’s leaders unless they’re confident that the eventual outcome will be worth it. DevOps will play a central role as enterprises begin to modernize legacy applications in 2016 and beyond. Within five years, DevOps will be the norm when it comes to software development.

How to get started
Seize the opportunity. When a leader approaches you with questions about DevOps, take advantage of the chance to discuss how it can benefit the organization more broadly. If you are a leader in the organization, a good start is to read “Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps principles at Scale” by Gary Gruver. This excellent guide provides a framework for large enterprises that executives can use to get started with and, eventually, scale DevOps.

Create your own luck. If leadership hasn’t approached you directly, proactively make your case for why and how DevOps can be useful if scaled throughout the organization. Include proof points from smaller project successes.

Start experimenting. If you haven’t attempted to use DevOps principles at all, start small. Find
a pilot project to which you can apply DevOps principles and show continuous improvement.
Teams seeking to adopt DevOps should embrace the willingness to fail and learn from failures
to move forward. Your mantra should be: Fail fast, learn, iterate, and improve. You can more
reliably achieve DevOps success by learning from failure, making continuous improvements,
and racking up incremental wins.

2. Standards will emerge

DevOps currently has no defined standards, so what passes for DevOps in one organization might not look much like DevOps in another. That means DevOps entails a certain amount of risk—and large enterprises are notoriously risk averse. Even if your small teams are documenting wins, scaling out DevOps successes to the broader organization can be a process of trial and error, which most enterprises don’t tend to engage in willingly.

As different teams experiment with DevOps and share their successes, there will be opportunities to standardize best practices gleaned from the lessons learned. Initially, the goal of standardization will be to help mitigate the risk of scaling DevOps practices. Those new standards could involve everything from testing processes to determining the best deployment tools to how to use internal coaching across teams. Eventually, as best practices emerge and are validated, they will likely become adopted and pervasive across industries.

For clues to where standard DevOps practices may be headed, see the forthcoming “DevOps Cookbook” by noted IT operations expert Gene Kim.

How to get started
Start small. Pick a modest pilot project that you can experiment with and try to implement some agreed-on DevOps best practices to get your teams working together on common goals, metrics, and joint successes.

Repeat and test. Test your assumptions against repeated projects before adopting them as standards throughout the organization.

Codify and automate. Once something works well, codify it. Make it automated and repeatable so you can reduce errors and accelerate routine tasks.

Analyze. After you have a few projects under your belt, determine what’s working and what’s not. What can be tweaked, and what needs to be thrown out?

3. Security will increasingly become integrated with DevOps

All large enterprises are focused on security. Whether they learned the hard way or watched other organizations get burned, they know that problems caught by users are far more damaging than a issues caught internally before they are released into production. As the pace of software delivery increases, it poses a challenge for security teams because their primary focus is on releasing and maintaining safe and secure applications. Doing things faster doesn’t necessarily give them the needed time to thoroughly vet applications before they get into end users’ hands. The challenge lies in finding the right combination of processes that allows thorough security assessments and keeps software releases flowing at a rapid pace. Bringing security and DevOps teams together offers a solution. Recent high-profile incidents have made it clear that security cannot be an afterthought. Security best practices and testing must be built into the development process from the beginning—and that means making it a part of the DevOps team.

Even though some DevOps teams have already started integrating security, full integration has not yet become mainstream. In 2016 and beyond, however, security team members will become increasingly integrated into DevOps practices. Since there are currently far more developers than application security experts, security will need to coach DevOps on how to effectively and efficiently embed application security within software development, deployment, and production cycles.

How to get started
Invite the security team to the table. By understanding all security requirements, you can plan to address them at the onset of the design and development process, thereby avoiding scrambles before application releases that can then cause delays. The initial planning and development cycles may take longer, but as security issues and practices become part of the standard process, these cycles will get shorter.

Test, test, test. Apply the “shift-left” concept to your security testing and continuously operate on the principle of willingness to fail fast, learn, adapt, and iterate often to create successful outcomes. Enlist tools and education that assist developers with safe coding practices and be sure to test early.

Automate and codify. Apply similar principles to security testing that you do in the quality assurance (QA) process. This will help ease the integration of security testing into standard processes.

4. Key technology adoptions that enable DevOps will take off

Because DevOps is still in the beginning stages of adoption, there are few defined tool chains for DevOps and no accepted single standards. However, as organizations increasingly learn and share success from their DevOps practices, this will start to change in 2016, with a few key technology concepts helping IT maximize speed and quality throughout the software development lifecycle.

Increasing automation
Automated testing, infrastructure, and application deployments speed up cycles and reduce errors. This is particularly important for decreasing cycle times in the software delivery lifecycle. As enterprises look to adopt DevOps, the first few wins from a technology tool chain perspective will occur through the adoption of automation that will accelerate tasks, eliminate manual handoffs, and cut down error-prone processes.

Decreasing latency
As organizations move to increase the pace of application delivery, they must look carefully at each lifecycle stage and identify and remove the biggest hurdles that impede rapid, high quality delivery cadence of software releases to customers. You can make significant progress by initially identifying the biggest bottlenecks in the “conveyer belt” delivery pipeline. It’s not particularly useful to remove smaller bottlenecks first because the major obstructions can still cause technical “debt” to build up earlier in the pipeline or reduce key resources further down in the pipeline.

Enabling visibility
For high quality applications to be delivered at a rapid pace from inception to the hands of end users, it is important to continuously assess and monitor them at every stage of the lifecycle. You must measure and analyze key metrics such as application user experience, the health and availability of the application and infrastructure, and threat and risk monitoring, sharing them across the team through continuous feedback loops. As you gather these metrics, it’s critical to measure them against the metrics that the company demands. If they don’t meet the business needs, you must then improve and iterate, making constant forward progress.

How to get started
Automate as much as you can. Take a look at how to automate time consuming, repeatable, error prone tasks in the software delivery lifecycle. Set up automatic testing triggers upon code check-in, automate handoffs between teams, and carefully explore how to leverage automation to consistently deploy and configure your infrastructure. Next, streamline application deployments. When hundreds of these deployments can occur as a result of a single lifecycle change, you’ll achieve much greater efficiency by automating certain steps, resulting in shorter release times and improvements in software quality.

Fine-tune your processes. To reduce bottlenecks that cause redundancies in your software delivery lifecycle, you need to build the right processes (aided by appropriate tool chains) to continuously build, test, and deploy every code change into the main trunk of the code repository, which should always be production ready. This does not mean that every line of code should be released to end users—that is a business decision. However, driving the culture of less significant but more frequent code changes will lead to higher quality applications and faster software delivery. Consider technologies such as testing virtualization, API-driven testing, and intelligent testing through data analytics.

Define and measure key metrics. As with security, you can “shift-left” to incorporate key metrics such as application user experience monitoring, health and availability of the application and infrastructure, and threat and risk monitoring right from the planning and development stages. By incorporating security as an integral part of the software development lifecycle tools and processes, developers can more easily find and fix flaws even before they release code into testing and production environments.

5. Job roles will evolve

Most IT organizations’ adoption of DevOps will force everyone to learn new skills—not just from a technical perspective, but also from a cultural one. As developers become more familiar with infrastructure, and operations staff gets more familiar with code, it’s inevitable that jobs will begin to evolve. Beginning in 2016, those changes will stretch beyond development and operations to impact business analysts, planning teams, and even C-level executives. For example, traditional system administrator roles will become less relevant as automation takes over many tasks, while “full-stack” engineers, who are familiar with the entire application technology stack, will start to become more critical. Roles will transform as teams become more horizontally embedded around products and services, and multiple roles become part of the extended DevOps delivery chain.

How to get started
Take in the bigger picture. Understand the broader context and intricacies of the varying objectives of the teams involved in the software delivery lifecycle. Whether you are a developer, tester, or operations manager, being aware of the challenges and goals of the extended team will help you align your own efforts to successfully achieve the broader DevOps team’s goals and will also begin to build your own skills across the “silos” that exist today.

Develop your skillsets. Make a concerted effort to gain new technical skills so you can more
effectively understand and operate successfully across today’s delivery silos. In particular,
developers must grasp how their applications operate and interact across the software delivery
cycle. Thus informed, they can collaborate more effectively with all the players involved.

Work together. The adoption of DevOps will necessitate greater collaboration and soft skills for all involved. Everyone can drive this forward by making an effort to understand and better align to the goals and objectives of the broader team tasked with making the business successful. Volunteer your ideas and skill sets beyond your own domain to gain the confidence and trust of the other members of your DevOps team.

Conclusions for DevOps in 2016

In the digital revolution where software will determine business leadership in the marketplace, it’s critical that enterprises understand the power of DevOps to help deliver higher quality software faster. DevOps is no longer a fringe movement or even simply an idea for so-called “unicorns.” It’s the way enterprise IT must operate to compete and stay relevant in the marketplace. Armed with these predictions, you can be ready for the changes to come—and take steps to be among the innovators, not those left behind.

DevOps adoption can help your enterprise deliver the quality, automation, and collaboration necessary to accelerate end-to-end application delivery. Find out how Hewlett Packard Enterprise has been adopting DevOps practices internally with its own IT and software product teams to increase its software delivery quality and pace.

Learn more at: hpe.com/software/devops

Staff Writer