All prognosticators, even us who simply roll out a single annual list, hope for two things: one, that your predictions get a lot of traction and shares across the industry, and two, that you end up actually being correct.
Anil Batra’s list of 2014 predictions has turned a lot of heads, largely due to the fact that he led off with such a bold one. “DevOps teams become the norm, not the exception.” While you would imagine that the DevOps faithful and its believers would be the biggest fans of this coming true this year, I would argue that it’s software customers who have received a product from DevOps-practicing teams that are waving the biggest flag.
Batra labels DevOps as once being only an “agile offshoot” which is hard to hard to believe that it once existed only as such, even in its still-young age, and this is credited to its meteoric rise in popularity—especially in the enterprise. Batra then plainly states, “In 2014, expect DevOps teams to sprout up in all large enterprises.”
“All” is an awfully large number; but at the end of the year, will Batra be correct?
Another area of software technology on an equally impressive rise, and one that many also enjoy predicting upon, is cloud computing and the emergence of “application-centric operations. ” The connection and interdependence of all of these practices cannot be overstated.
While DevOps, cloud computing, and even agile, can all stand alone, it’s their dramatic effectiveness when combined that give Batra’s prediction seriously favorable odds. All three strive for (and achieve) easier collaboration, continuous integration, and rapidly produced software and services with fewer defects—the latter being what all customers expect from every software provider.
Once thought to work best only on smaller projects, agile has seen it’s own share of success at the enterprise level, but ReadWriteWeb’s Matt Asay points out that it’s DevOps that is “reshaping” the enterprise industry. What is it about DevOps that is fueling it’s growth in what Asay calls, “the stodgy old enterprise?” His answer:
Quite simply, because it works. Because IT operations and development are better in collaboration than in competition. As the survey uncovered, high-performing, DevOps-savvy organizations deploy code 30 times faster with 50% fewer failures. And, strikingly, the longer DevOps practices are followed within an organization, the lower that organization’s app failure rate and the faster its recovery from failure.
Any software company trying to survive in today’s hyper-competitive market knows that delivering better software faster is the number one key to success. With DevOps’ short (but that will change) track record, Batra’s prediction that “all” enterprises will have DevOps teams by the end of the year isn’t that hard to believe.
My prediction? Enterprises that fail to incorporate DevOps into their development practices will experience failure just as quickly as those who embrace DevOps experience success. And as that failure mounts, enterprises will either make a change, or simply cease to exist—making Batra’s “all” that much closer to fruition.
