DevOps Hits Adolescence – what’s next?

Featured Guest: Charles Betz, Forrester
DevOps Hits Adolescence – what’s next?

© 2018 Forrester. Reproduction PROHIBITED.
DevOps Hits Adolescence — What’s
Next?
Charles T. Betz
Principal Analyst
@CharlesTBetz
cbetz@Forrester.com
December 6, 2018

7© 2018 FORRESTER. REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED.
Agenda
› It’s hard to believe that DevOps has been around for nearly ten years. From its specialist “unicorn” origins to a broadly accepted set of
principles adopted by companies of all sizes and stripes, DevOps has been one of the most transformative movements in information
technology since the PC. What comes next? In this wide-ranging webinar, Forrester Principal Analyst and DevOps Lead, Charles Betz,
will take on:
› The transforming I&O organization: integrated product teams, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), GitOps, and “code-first” operations
› Cognitive DevOps
› DevOps and the automation paradox
› DevOps and Enterprise Service Management
› The convergence of Continuous Integration, release automation, and configuration management
› Cloud providers’ play for the DevOps pipeline

Some DevOps basics

Transforming the business to be customer focused
and deliver value directly to the customer via digital
capabilities.
Digital Transformation:

Customers Link Software Delivery Success To
Business Strategy
Disagree (1,2)
10%
Middle (3)
24%
Agree (4,5)
66%
Digital technology enhancements are the driving force behind
our business strategy (scale 1-5)
Total Sample Size: N=2,809
Business Technographics® Business and Technology Services Survey, 2017

© Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District
Source: http://blog.livehelpnow.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/speedometer-540-2501.png
Not speed at the expense of quality,
but…
Speed with quality
Not completion of work, but…
Creation of value
Not speed of current project, but..
future projects
Cumulative Speed
of current and

Defining DevOps
› DevOps (a mashup of “development” and “operations”)
› is a transformative movement in digital and IT management,
› that describes and advocates for the management practices,
technical capabilities, and cultural behaviors
› that optimally support the fast and effective delivery (including
design, architecture, testing, security, and runtime
management)
› of software-based systems.

Positioning DevOps

Change & stability
Smaller changes
Improved time to market
with stability
Change capability - improved
More frequent changes
+
Improved time to market
with stability
Automated build, test,
deploy, canary
deployments, roll back,
monitoring, observability,
processes, culture

A simple DevOps reference architecture
Source
repo
- hosts: server
sudo: yes
sudo_user: root
tasks:
- name: install mysql-server
apt: name=mysql-server
function writeIt(){
diswin = window.open();
diswin.document.open();
diswin.document.write(temp2);
diswin.document.close() } Package
Repo
Pre-production
Production
Build Automation Release Automation
Infrastructure
Automation
Monitor
Pipeline as code
Artifacts
and models
Provisioning
& Control
Infrastructure
as code
Deployment
GitOps
Release {“myrelease”}{
phase (“dev”) {
build (“env1”)
execute (“test1”)
}
}
PipelineAppInfra
Agent versus agentless –
still a thing

2018 Research

Then and now
› 2010: “Ten deploys a day? Are they NUTS?”
› 2014: “What’s DevOps?”
› 2018: “We’ve tried it and like the pilot results. But what
about…”
• ITIL, our NOC, and our Service Desk?
• Auditors?
• Packaged software?
• What if we have 12 projects in flight but only enough staff for 3 steady
state product teams?
• Our ops staff who do not have “infrastructure as code” skills?
› 2019: Peak DevOps?

This year’s infrastructure survey – some teasers
› Between 2017 and 2018, the percentage of
companies expressing the highest interest in
DevOps increased by 33%, from 40% to 53%
of all surveyed.
› 22% of respondents are using DevOps for all
new applications, and 26% are transforming
their entire portfolio (including legacy apps) to
DevOps approaches.
› However, concern for security and
governance is the highest-cited obstacle for
DevOps, mentioned by 34%.
Forrester's Global Business Technographics Developer Survey, 2017-18

2018 lessons: people
› DevOps mindshare continues to
grow
› Customers are stuck on
organizational questions

Product teams
leverage Shared
Services to
accomplish
specialized
tasks.
Shared Resource
teams measure
success by the success
of product teams

Software survey 2018

2018 lessons: process
› “Pipeline as code” rocks!
› Release automation != release
management. Interface with ITSM?
› CDRA vendors are advancing towards
continuous cognitive delivery.

Site Reliability Engineering
› In a world of “you build it, you run it” integrated
product teams, what is SRE?
› We propose “3 Gs”
• Guardrails
• Guidance
• Governance
› 53% of 3000+ infrastructure pros surveyed in
2018 indicate their org is already implementing
or expanding

2018 lessons: technology
› The market as a whole is
converging (more later)
› Cloud native capabilities quickly
became table stakes in 2018
› Terraform is becoming a de facto
standard.
› Cloud providers pipelines will
disrupt

CogOps applied: Release readiness

Looking ahead

CDRA marketStack
Lifecycle
CI origins
(Jenkins,
Bamboo)
Element/automation
origins (Chef,
Puppet)
CD/ARA origins
(XebiaLabs,
UrbanCode)
• “Close to the metal” control
• Challenged by Kubernetes
and next gen IaC
• Choreography but lots of
scripting
• Popular with developers
• Not initially developed for
production deployment
• Model-based,
declarative (less
scripting)
• Production-grade
security
Project, product, service mgmt
ITOM & related

Cloud plays
Possible outcome: people will “use the thing that comes with the thing.”
• CodePipeline for AWS
• Azure Devops
• Google Open Cloud & ecosystem
One scenario: a few pure-play ARA vendors survive to service hybrid & multi-cloud
To what extent will the cloud DevOps pipelines interoperate?

ESM Conceptual Architecture
› Service accessibility
› Service fulfillment consistency,
speed, and transparency
› Flexible service configuration
› Core IT service management
• Strategic digital services
• Workflow-based services
• External services

Continuous Delivery And Release Automation
ESM covers the entire Digital Pipeline

What is the relationship between DevOps and ESM?
› DevOps is how the most important services are
created and sustained
› DevOps is a harbinger of where the REST of work
needs to go
› Fast flow
› Continuous learning
› Collaborative
› Relentlessly automated, but people are NOT
replaced … the sociotechnical system as a whole
becomes more capable … because the competition
demands it.

ESM and CDRA overlap
“Require to Deploy” value stream

Market spaces
CDRA
ESM
Portfolio/Project
APM
Analytics
ITOM
CSM
NextGen
Incident

Faster
release
cycles
Automated
resiliency
MTTR
decreases
Complexity
(e.g.distributed
microservices)
Knowledge is
shorter lived
MTTR
increases???
“Known error” lifecycles decrease
Ambitious organizations exploit stability
The DevOps/stability paradox

Increasing automation
Faster release cycles
MTTR
Ephemeral knowledge
Increasing complexity
The automation paradox U-curve
Time

The consequences of knowledge lifecycle shrinking
Tier 1
Tier 2
Tier 3
Less
urgent
More urgent
Critical
Long lived known errors and the
3-tier model have been the basis
for IT operating models and help
desk outsourcing
How will we develop staff?

The organizations that will truly excel in
the future will be the organizations that
discover how to tap people’s commitment
and capacity to learn at all levels in an
organization.
Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline

Knowledge-centered support

Swarming
› From hierarchy to network

Looking to other domains
https://www.flickr.com/photos/matt_hecht/11240697165, commercial use permitted

Recommendations
› Know your business objectives.
› How will you support and secure your digital pipelines and toolchain?
› Decide whether you will pursue best of breed or an integrated toolchain.
› Evaluate the pros and cons of agent vs agentless approaches.
› Manage your pipelines, preferably “as code.”
› Prepare for market consolidation to accelerate in 2019.
› Keep an eye on automation paradox, the increasing importance of
knowledge management, and influences from safety-critical domains.

DevOps Hits Adolescence – what’s next?

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