DevOps has a great momentum in the industry at this point, as can be seen by the growth of searches of topics related to it. Different from “ALM” and “Agile”, which are very generic terms which makes it difficult to filter out the noise, DevOps is unique and allows a more clear cut picture. Let’s take a look at it using Google Trends.
If you look into just the last year, when compared to “Application Lifecycle Management” and other trendy topics in IT, it seems that the curve is pretty much stable:
You have to look at the big picture to understand the magnitude of the current momentum DevOps has:
On the conservative side, we can gather a couple of things from those numbers:
- Application Lifecycle Management has always been a relatively popular topic, but never caught up as a really growing trend;
- Continuous Delivery and DevOps came from no presence to a steady growth for the former, and an explosive growth for the latter.
- The idea of Continuous Integration has existed for a while until it was codified in the well known Martin Fowler article.
On the outrageously optimistic side, for those of us who worked under that umbrella, and thought it was big, the prospects of DevOps dwarf all trends that have come before. You need only say: WOW!
Behind all this growth is the convergence of trends pushing for faster and faster release cycles:
- The realization of the inadequacy of their existing infrastructure has taken many companies to the Cloud, for example to be able to more easily meet regulatory demands for disaster recovery;
- The new business environment requires ways for social interaction that change from week to week, leading to many more deployments to adapt to new business opportunities;
- The same new business environment potentiallly exposes applications to potential viral trends. What if you need to scale up/out faster and quickly to grab a new opportunity, is your infrastructure elastic enough?
You can summarize all this in the following expression: Application Modernization. This has been going in waves that are hitting more and more frequently.
The first App Modernization wave was the transition to computing itself: businesses moved at the glacial pace of manual handling of information. The next wave was moving applications out of the mainframe to client server in the early 90’s, and the following one was exposing those same applications to the web. Now comes the next wave when the move is to the Cloud to allow for sharing of the knowledge of how to scale your application, which before had to be achieved by each company on their your own at an expensive cost.
And there comes the need for DevOps. This new wave of app modernization can only be done if you prepare your whole development process to work tightly with operations, and with the flexibility of the Cloud.
Working with cutting edge DevOps is one of the reasons I joined Nebbia, and hopefully I can contribute to our DevOps team as much as am getting from them.
