Partner Article

Will we talk about DevOps in five years?

Rackspace, the managed cloud company, has today released further findings from its global study into the uptake of DevOps [1] programmes for software application development and delivery. The research highlights that 60 per cent of UK companies already implementing DevOps have DevOps-specific roles in their organisations while 52 per cent still planning implementation will not have DevOps-specific roles in-house.

In the organisations that have implemented DevOps, the primary roles have been the DevOps developers (34 per cent), followed by DevOps engineers (29 per cent) and DevOps system admins (23 per cent). And, for those in planning phase, the DevOps consultant (22 per cent) was cited as the role believed most crucial to the success of the project.

Nigel Beighton VP of Technology and Product at Rackspace said: “The early DevOps adopters brought DevOps into their businesses by creating specific DevOps roles; which works when you are needing to build early-adopter competency/knowledge. Longer term for the mass market this is potentially counterproductive to the principle of breaking down operational silos in order to improve collaboration and ultimately productivity.”

“Now, as DevOps matures and consultants and partners begin to emerge, the mass market second-phase adopters are well placed to use external parties to help embed DevOps into the entire IT operation. Building out a DevOps capability with a partner, alongside the existing teams, is a great way to accelerate the implementation and reduce the dependency on specific DevOps-roles; leaving not only the developers and operations, but the organisation to work together in a coherent and stable way.

“As we move forward it remains to be seen whether these roles will persist or if we will start to see them tailing off as respective Development and Operations teams adapt to the new way of working.”

Outsourcing Automation Services

Outsourcing DevOps services to third parties is an area that both groups are looking to in terms of expanding their DevOps skills base. 52 per cent of those that have implemented DevOps currently outsource some or all of these automated services, with 51 per cent intending to outsource DevOps services when they have implemented their DevOps projects.

Beighton continues: “Outsourcing the basic plumbing of a DevOps model, for example configuration management and application performance monitoring capabilities, allows teams to advance business value faster if they can partner up with experts who can take care of the low-level execution while they focus on innovation and productivity.”

Eagle Eye, a business that specialises in digital customer engagement started using Rackspace’s DevOps Automation service last year. The inhouse developer and operations teams collaborate with Rackspace specialists to discuss real time application insight and performance metrics, make decisions about application architecture and ensure the infrastructure automation is optimal in respect to market conditions.

Steve Rothwell, Founder and Director, Eagle Eye said: “With the help of the DevOps specialists at Rackspace we can react to the market like never before, have the flexibility to scale up and down and get products to potential and existing customers faster. We let Rackspace focus on our infrastructure and the tools we need to run more efficiently and our team can focus on writing code for our products. It’s the perfect fit.”

Ends

For organisations in early DevOps implementation or for those planning to introduce it, here are some helpful tips:

Start with your ‘Why’

Why do you need DevOps? What is the business issue you need to solve? What it the IT issue you need to solve? It sounds simple, but if you can’t challenge yourself to come up with a good why statement, you don’t have a good mandate for starting.

Look at your culture

A successful transformation starts with a culture that can break down traditional development and operations silos, promotes communication between everyone involved in delivering applications, and emphasises constant process and product improvement.

Identify your catalyst

There has to be someone in the business who can bring teams together and evangelise about DevOps. The research shows that IT operations is a great place to identify the catalyst and lead the DevOps initiative.

Identify your application

Start by finding a candidate application to put through the DevOps process. It should be an application that is valuable but not business critical.

Set goals

Think about the goals you want to set for the project – not just your usual project goals, like app stability, deadlines, faster deployment; but also the end business goal, like cost cutting, increasing productivity, or increasing customer engagement. This will unite the team around a common purpose, rather than setting individual goals for each team or person.

Be CALMS

Once you’ve got your working party in place, use the CALMS framework:

Culture – Keep the emphasis on collaboration and communication Automation – Identify the tools that can take the manual steps out of your value chain Lean – Use lean principles to enable higher cycle frequency Metrics – Measure everything and use the data to refine cycles, you need a continual feedback loop Sharing – Share experiences, successful or not, to enable others to learn, constant improvement is central to DevOps

These are the pillars of a successful DevOps implementation. Ignoring just one can compromise overall effectiveness. They will also serve as benchmark to assess your capability and highlight the areas you need to improve.

Get help

Many of the organisations in this survey have already made the decision to outsource some of their DevOps services to third parties. When it comes to managing structure and code, deploying and monitoring, you’d really rather have people do it. Instead of worrying about infrastructure readiness, you teams can spend their time responding to customer feedback by delivering new application features as fast as you can code.

About the research

Rackspace commissioned independent technology market research specialist Vanson Bourne to undertake this piece of research. 700 IT decision makers from organisations with more than 250 employees were interviewed throughout September 2014. Respondents came from an even distribution of sizes/sectors and were from the following countries: US (350), UK (250) and Australia (100). These interviews were conducted online using a rigorous multi-level screening process to ensure only suitable candidates were given the opportunity to participate.

About Rackspace

Rackspace (NYSE: RAX) is the #1 managed cloud company. Its technical expertise and Fanatical Support® allow companies to tap the power of the cloud without the pain of hiring experts in dozens of complex technologies. Rackspace is also the leader in hybrid cloud, giving each customer the best fit for its unique needs — whether on single- or multi-tenant servers, or a combination of those platforms. Rackspace is the founder of OpenStack®, the open-source operating system for the cloud. Based in San Antonio, Rackspace serves more than 300,000 business customers from data centers on four continents. It ranks #29 on Fortune’s list of 100 Best Companies to Work For. www.rackspace.co.uk

[1] DevOps integrates developers and operations teams in order to improve collaboration and productivity by automating infrastructure, automating workflows and continuously measuring application performance.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Rackspace UK .