DevOps has been around for more than a decade as a method to rapidly develop and deploy applications. But methods and concepts pioneered years ago are only now beginning to dog the digital business transformation.
Ever since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, digital business transformation has been all the rage. Whether the global economy expands or shrinks, organizations of all sizes now have a deeper appreciation for digital processes.
DevOps wag the dog
Not long ago, ironically, business executives regularly complained that IT simply wasn’t keeping pace with the needs of the organization. At next month’s CloudBees DevOps World 2022 conference in Orlando, it will be clear that businesses are embracing concepts defined by DevOps pioneers to not only keep up with the current pace of application development innovation, but also to manage the business in many ways. himself.
“It’s all about the software,” Mitch Ashley, publisher of both DevOps.com and Digital CxO, an arm of TechStrong Group, said on a recent podcast.
Of course, the change in the relationship between IT and the business that supports it is a long time coming. The debate over how to close the divide between IT and the rest of the business has been going on for decades. Even with the development of DevOps, more than 11 years have passed since Jenkins’ Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) platform was officially launched. Today, advances in IT are happening at a pace that many businesses now struggle to absorb.
In fact, what started as a small group of application development and deployment specialists looking for ways to automate the building and deployment of applications has now grown into a multi-billion dollar software industry. And it’s driving business transformation not seen since the advent of PCs running word processing and spreadsheet applications in the 1980s.
Software is (still) eating the world.
How big of an impact DevOps will have in the future remains to be seen. It’s still early days when it comes to adopting DevOps best practices but, as Marc Andreessen once said, software continues to eat the world. Today, much of that software takes DevOps best practices into account and makes it easier than ever to add new capabilities to applications both inside and outside the cloud using everything from containers to serverless computing frameworks. The pace at which technological innovations are being made continues to expand.
As such, it’s arguably never been more important for DevOps professionals to be in person to share knowledge and insights. During the Covid-19 pandemic, DevOps platforms have evolved significantly. Teams using those platforms will have more impact in their organizations than ever before. The best way to appreciate the value of DevOps is always to learn how practitioners use those principles to achieve broader strategic business goals.
No matter how large or small the organization, the need to embrace and continuously improve DevOps processes and workflows is, as always, a pressing concern. It may be possible to achieve a goal alone, but there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that there is nothing like spending a few days with a few thousand like-minded souls to make those goals that much easier to achieve.
Want to know more about this and other related topics? Join CloudBees DevOps World 2022It was held at the Marriott World Center in Orlando, Florida. Use discount code DW22 when you register and get access to all the fantastic offerings including keynotes, sessions, training and other interactive activities. We can’t wait to see you there for DevOps Remix!
