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The coming devops movement



Alex Handy
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March 21, 2011 —  (Page 1 of 4)
There was a time when dev was development and ops was IT operations. But like the famous Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup advertising, someone got dev in their ops team. Or did they get ops in their dev team? Whichever way the pendulum swings, the devops movement—if it is a movement—is about breaking down the walls between the people who write software and the people who have to keep it running.

That’s because traditional IT operations focused on information running within the organization, such as desktops or servers in the data centers. While IT operations naturally expanded to cover servers deployed in remote data centers, such as hosting facilities, applications running in the cloud appear to be defying that traditional role. And thus managers are hiring devops: developer operations specialists within the development department itself.

Devops was the big trend for 2010, with job-search site Indeed recording an increase in the term “Devops” in available job postings. While the term is still far behind mainstay development words like “Java,” “C” and even “Ruby” in job ads, the growth of the term was far beyond the growth rate of any other development term across the year.

Andrew Phillips, vice president of product development at XebiaLabs, which sells an automated Java application deployment system, believes that the devops role is a genuine movement, not merely a new name for an old job. “A movement is always a big term. I think when agile started it wasn't a movement, but now it's become in fashion," he said.

"I think we'll see a similar development with devops. It's just a mindset that realizes you can’t split development and operations in your organization and still expect quick turnaround release cycles."

Inspiration and revelation
Mike Maciag, CEO of Electric Cloud, which sells build and continuous integration tools, said that devops comes from the ever-rising popularity of agile. “We're seeing customers bridge that devops gap. Some of that is driven by agile," he said.

"If you're talking about agile, it's how fast can I turn that crank? I need a lot of machines, so I need to work with IT. Virtualization is helping people solve that problem."



Related Search Term(s): professional development, Devops,

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Comments


03/21/2011 12:54:54 PM EST

Great article Alex - I'm surprised that Mike Gualtieri thinks that cloud computing will be the undoing of the DevOps movement. I think it is quite the contrary. Maybe it's just a different understanding of what the term means. In my view, software-as-a-service is what started the DevOps movement. The fact that the traditional IT services can be outsourced to IaaS or PaaS providers creates a need for "infrastructure software" - software that facilitates operations such as agile deployment, quick spin up and tear down of server instances, configuration management, and all sorts of other automation... All these "new" operations tasks are done in code, so the marriage between Dev and Ops is natural. Another reason why moving to the cloud is fostering the DevOps movement is that with cloud services, any hiccup in operations has an immediate impact on revenue. Downtime or slow sites cause a measurable decline in customer satisfaction or worse, customer loss. That's why developers - particularly in the SaaS space always code with operations in mind. Dave Kresse is spot on with his remarks about "closing the feedback loop". DevOps is also very much about visualization in real-time of key metrics. Tools such as Librato Silverline, NewRelic, CloudKick, Loggly, etc. (disclosure: I work for Librato) can give real time insight into server resource usage (virtual or physical), performance bottlenecks, etc. but key difference is that it is now at the application level as opposed to the hardware level - that is the feedback loop that cloud services need. With these tools, you can react immediately to unexpected spikes in resource consumption or a drop in performance and within seconds you can pull up logs and time series charts to hone in on the source of the problem. I say DevOps has only just started and is here to stay.

United StatesNik Wekwerth


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