DevOps will become front of mind for UK enterprises

The majority of the real DevOps implementation success stories are still coming from small and medium sized organisations. In 2015, I’m looking for the first high-profile FTSE-250 organisation with large compliance or audit requirements to use DevOps and demonstrate how to help overcome the complexities of working with highly sensitive data with more cloud and automation. These organisations with more complex internal structures will realise it’s not just the relationship between developers and operations that matters. It could be the relationship between developers and corporate security, or between operations and sales. Applying the principles of DevOps to other relationships in the business will help large enterprises come out with a really successful DevOps story.

With Hype Comes Cynicism
Our own research suggests we haven’t yet hit the height of DevOps adoption. As hype builds in 2015, I hope we won’t see (but imagine that we will) the emergence of a Senior Vice-President of DevOps or other such role. This would be a mistake, since the idea of DevOps is to break down silos so having someone responsible for the DevOps silo seems ironic and will invite cynical commentary that damages the credibility of the whole movement. This is where DevOps has a chance to differentiate from previous models by eliminating siloed behaviour and ensuring more of the responsible teams understand the whole end to end process of value creation. In addition to this, hype naturally always comes with some disillusionment, so at some point there will be stories of ‘DevOps broke my business’. It’s unlikely to be the root cause and would suggest that businesses will continue to adopt a tool-based approach to solving problems rather than giving enough consideration to the people, culture and commercial objectives in the organisation.

People Will Triumph Over Tools
Following on from my last point, the businesses that will win with DevOps will be those committed to their people rather than those only buying tools to improve their ability to automate. It’s very difficult to write a tool that both developers and operators love because they have different objectives and responsibilities - I don’t think we will get a tool that does both because, fundamentally, the two groups will always need to have two different approaches. The businesses which realise that enabling empathy between two groups is the sustainable solution and that allowing a common understanding to suggest tool choice will yield more effective results will ultimately get better ROI from any tool or service investments they make. A tool-first approach could mean a lack of buy-in as different people join the project later on or that it was based on the requirements of only a subset of stakeholders in a DevOps process.

Platform-as-a-Service Will Enter the Conversation
As we get towards the back end of 2015 there’s going to be more and more conversation around how and when all these new tools and workflows get abstracted. At what point do things like Platform-as-a-service start to dictate the automation behind DevOps? As you focus on technology problems closer to the application, do you start to care less about what it runs on or what load balancer you’re using? Managing data centres, plus infrastructure, plus automation, plus applications becomes a very broad, complex and expensive scope. Being able to focus on how you write apps and not how you manage servers – is potentially one of the reasons that DevOps will actually drive more PaaS adoption. We’re seeing an increase in the number of offerings and services that are building these capabilities and I expect these to become a more prominent consideration for businesses this year.

Enterprises Will Ditch the Sand Bags
As new technologies and services like containers and PaaS generate the next wave of technology innovation. Enterprises will start to realise that to chase these opportunities they need to clear out some of the heavy weight of legacy they are carrying. Adoption of SaaS based business services like email and communications will increase in velocity as Enterprises look to shed non-value add elements of their portfolio to free resources that can explore the feasibility of container technology. Businesses that ignore Gartner’s model for Bi-Modal IT will find it increasingly difficult to compete if they are not able to compartmentalise the old and new estate.

DevOps will Thrive in High-Growth, High-Competition Verticals
We will start to see patterns in DevOps use cases emerge. Many businesses are already working away behind the scenes to enable the benefits that DevOps can bring and as they start to realise the benefit of telling that story in technical communities, we’ll see clear adoption patterns. DevOps is focused on enabling speed and agility in IT and ultimately your business. There will be particular sectors and verticals this plays well in whether they are digital and ecommerce or mobile and social. Areas where Big Data, online business and highly competitive markets intersect tend to be good places for DevOps to thrive, for example the online travel industry. In 2015, we will see more and more customers who fall into these high-growth, high-competition verticals championing DevOps as a means to capture talent and understand that collaboration and sharing is a community activity as well as an internal one.