DevOps will evolve from being a niche strategy to a mainstream practice implemented by a quarter of Global 2000 firms, Gartner believes.
Although DevOps - a concept aimed at improving interaction between app developers and IT operations staff - is a primarily a people and culture-based strategy, increased uptake will involve new technologies and processes. This will lead to strong sales of DevOps toolsets, Gartner said.
The researcher expected the total market for DevOps tools to reach $2.3 billion in 2015, up 21.1 per cent from US$1.9 billion in 2014.
"In response to the rapid change in business today, DevOps can help organisations that are pushing to implement a bimodal strategy to support their digitalisation efforts," said Laurie Wurster, research director at Gartner.
The cultural merge of operations with development demands a linked toolchain of technologies to facilitate collaborative change, which Gartner categorises as DevOps-ready, -enabled and –capable.
During a presentation last November, Dick Smith’s IT chief, Paul Keen, shared his challenging experience around moving DevOps to the cloud, borrowing popular Charles Dickens phrase, “it was the best of times; it was the worst of times”.
“When it’s working, it’s a thing of beauty,” he told attendees at the Randstad-hosted event. “But most of the time, it’s really an uphill battle to get it to work. But it’s worth it.”
Moving DevOps to the cloud is now allowing Dick Smith to move faster than the competition, but Keen said for a DevOps strategy to be successful, culture, technology and patience were crucial.
The introduction of better DevOps tools is expected to ease the process, as Keen described how early products such as AWS’ OpsWorks [an application lifecycle management tool], were a key pain point.
Gartner’s Wurster says there are still several gaps that prevent implementation of DevOps as a comprehensive methodology in organisations.
"Enterprises have acknowledged these gaps and have begun assessing how the DevOps mindset might apply to their own environments. However, culture is not easily or quickly changed.
“Key to the culture within DevOps is the notion of becoming more agile and changing behaviour to support it — a perspective that has not been widely pursued within classical IT operations,” he said.
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