DevOps at 10: Adoption across the enterprise would be the icing on the cake

As it passes the 10-year milestone DevOps no longer needs to explain itself, but it's still painful for some

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the coining of the term DevOps by Patrick Debois and Andrew Shafer.

Debois has spoken of his surprise that the term ever caught on. That it did is down to a fortunate confluence of the arrival of cloud, the growing popularity of Agile - and Twitter. Debois simply lumped together two abbreviations to create a convenient hashtag with which to push a series of events he had created (DevOpsDays) to promote the use of Agile in systems administration.

The timing was right. As in-house hardware was steadily replaced by virtual machines, the Agile methodologies adopted enthusiastically by developers were increasingly available to operations staff too. But first Devs and Ops had to stop thinking of themselves as separate tribes. Given the underlying technological changes, the shift that DevOps describes was probably always going to happen, but having a memorable label focuses minds.

That said, it took a few more years to become part of the standard vocabulary. Certainly, it was a niche for the first five years. But then our research among Computing readers from 2016 to 2018 showed an enormous leap each year in the numbers of organisations taking their first steps in DevOps, and there was huge interest in finding out more.

But these numbers have seemingly plateaued this year. This could be the result of a survey anomaly of course, or a natural slowing down, or it could be that DevOps has hit some sort of wall. Only about 20 per cent said they have managed to merge their Dev and Ops functions - the same as last year - with more of them describing the process as ‘painful' than in 2018.

As a rather loosely defined term, DevOps has always been extensible and inclusive. As more walls are broken down new disciplines are drawn into the fold. There has been much talk of DevSecOps (and somewhat less of DevNetOps) over the past 18 months, but among our respondents at least, neither security nor networking functions were any more integrated into the pipeline than was the case last year.

So what's going on. Has the bubble burst?

Well, no. Almost certainly not. A much more likely scenario is that many more companies are sitting up and taking notice of this new way of doing IT, but these companies may have much greater legacy to deal with than the early movers and shakers, the Netflix's and Ubers which were mainly born in the cloud. So uptake is much slower.

But even for those firms that are already Agile and automated to the max, there are areas where DevOps can get stuck. Typically this occurs where there are mismatches of pace and expectations between IT and the rest of the business. DevOps moves fast while business is slower and more considered. DevOps values experimentation whereas many people prefer stability. Warts-and-all MVPs can meet with bewilderment rather than delight. "Why didn't they finish it before rolling it out?" is still quite a common response even as people expect upgrades and patches to arrive overnight.

Expectations are hard to meet. Certainly, this was the case for a few practitioners we spoke to. More people this year said DevOps had failed to meet the customer's expectations than last year.

"We do not turn around developments and new systems anywhere near quickly enough for customer expectations," said one head of IT.

Indeed speed was the sticking point for many of those respondents who said that DevOps was stumbling.

To put this into context, though, this was a minority. Three-quarters of those on the DevOps journey reported that things were going as well or better than expected.

Interestingly, whereas last year improving quality was (just) the most important goal, this year it was back to speed of delivery. Devops should be about speed, quality and security, rather than two out of three, and in the war against time, quality can be the first casualty. Again, this suggests that a larger proportion of respondents were newer to DevOps than last year or whose rate of adoption was slower; those who self-identified as ‘Advancing' or ‘Mature' (25 per cent or so) were more likely to prioritise improving software quality than speed of delivery.

'Advancing' and 'mature' firms were also those for whom DevOps and Agile culture had broken out of the IT department and was fanning outwards across the business, a metric in a security model put forward recently by vendors Puppet and Splunk.

And advancing and mature firms were also automating more areas, with service automation a cross-departmental endeavour. Although there's still a long way to go before most are delivered autonomously without any intervention from IT. Another 10 years perhaps.