The level of interest in DevOps is growing rapidly and becoming an evergreen subject for many enterprise and startup development teams. A simple Google Trends search reveals that DevOps as a keyword has been growing since 2011 and over 2013 and 2014 saw its greatest growth.
DevOps may have a model and definition–software engineering that stresses communication, collaboration, and integration between software development and operations teams (or Information Technology)–in the field implementations vary as much as teams do. It is also a takes-two-to-tango supposition, therefore handling only one side of the equation doe not work.
For example, in 2014 we have seen an explosion of Agile methods, significantly shortened development times and advanced deployment of the systems. The same happens when the operations side seeks to create more standardized processes, such as adoption of Agile ops practices, automation of testing and configuration, and advanced fault detection.
Predicting the 2015 DevOps impact on IT performance and development practices and overall organizational performance, using metrics that matter to the business means it’s worth a look back at the trends and tools brought on board during 2014.
Top DevOps tools and trends of 2014
As per the “2014 state of devops report” from Puppet Labs, DevOps adoption accelerated last year, and that high-performing IT organizations were more agile and reliable, deploying code 30 times more frequently with 50 percent fewer failures. Technological instrumentation for automation lifecycle, such as version control and automatic code deployment, also took center stage in 2014.
The report found that job satisfaction is the number one interpreter of organizational performance and DevOps practices increase employee satisfaction, leading to better business outcomes. High performing IT organizations have 50 percent lower change fail rates than medium and low performing IT organizations. Deployment is often the biggest pain point leading to the implementation of DevOps practices.
In 2014, Chef, maker of a very popular DevOps tool set, saw over 70 percent of sales occur in the Global 2000 businesses and expect this trend to continue. The main barriers that prevented companies adopting DevOps were the lack of the concept, cultural (both environment and collaboration), lack of training, both managerial and technical professionals, development and operations, the emergence of significant automation controls and orchestration, and the continued expansion of the cloud, Big Data, and virtualization.
Puppet Labs
IT automation software company Puppet Labs is riding the wave of DevOps in the enterprise. Last year, the company released an all-new Puppet Apps platform, new management and reporting capabilities, new version of Puppet Enterprise and a major update to the Puppet language. The platform update represents the next gen Puppet server that takes into account the ever increasing role of cloud and virtualization in the enterprise.
One thing that makes Puppet distinct from other DevOps automation tools is that Puppet uses a simple, domain-based programming language called Puppet to enable configuration and descriptive infrastructure management. The company is taking steps toward selling services to manage a growing range of web-connected devices.
In September, the company announced new programs designed to meet global demand for its industry-leading IT automation software. The Puppet Labs Partner Network, Puppet Enterprise Supported modules and Puppet Approved modules will give entire ecosystem support and training to promote the widespread usage of IT automation across the entire data center.
Chef
Automated infrastructure with Chef allows DevOps teams to reduce time-to-market, manage scalability, complexity and the security of systems. Last year, the company announced an expanded ecosystem of cooperating companies including Amazon Web Services, Docker, Google, HP, IBM, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, Rackspace, VMware, and others to accelerate software delivery and simplify infrastructure management. The partner program is designed to encourage DevOps culture to satisfy consumer demand, and to react to changes in real time and at scale.
Chef also collaborated with Microsoft Open Technologies to deliver a series of Chef Cookbooks providing cloud infrastructure automation capabilities for Microsoft Azure. Chef also supports IBM Power Systems and the AIX operating system for rapid resource provisioning and full application lifecycle management.
In September, Chef released Chef 12 to users by converging open source and premium features into a unified codebase. The freemium model of Chef 12 provides three usage tiers including unified codebase, ommercial support for the entire tool chain and free usage tier with premium features designed to address the entire spectrum of business needs.
In addition, Chef extended its open source and commercial automation platforms with framework like Chef Metal and Chef Actions, a developer kit Chef DK, Docker support, Knife Plug-in and others to increase the appeal of the open source IT framework to enterprise IT organizations.
Ansible
Open source software solution for remote configuration management Ansible last year announced the availability of Ansible Tower 2.0. This was major upgrade to Ansible’s complete orchestration, configuration management and application deployment solution for enterprise DevOps teams.
Ansible added a new, updated UI, real time configuration output and exploration and real time, a new command line interface tool, added expanded cloud support–with the addition of VMWare’s vSphere, Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine–and expanded operating system support–with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and CentOS 7.
Ansible Tower is proving to be a mission-critical DevOps tool in organizations like NASA, GoPro, EA, and Hughes. Ansible says that Tower 2.0 dramatically improves and simplifies the DevOps automation user experience so that teams can focus on their applications, rather than their IT automation.
Back in March, Ansible announced the availability of Ansible Tower AMIs on the AWS Marketplace. Ansible Tower AMIs are designed for various deployment options and uses industry-standard SSH to communicate with managed nodes.
Salt
Salt unveiled to the public for the first time in March 2011 and emerged from an in-house software systems to become an open source server management and automation solution used for cloud deployment and configuration management.
Last year, the company released Salt 2014.1.0 release with a large 7085 commits, making it one of the biggest releases. This release supported Google Compute Engine, IBM SoftLayer and Windows Azure and also provided support for managing Docker environments, BSD package management, Debian/Ubuntu network management, and PagerDuty integration.
Automation via Salt aids cloud and software development teams, data center operations and enterprise IT organizations configure and automate essential IT systems at the speed and scale required by the most advanced cloud infrastructures.
Atlassian
Atlassian, the leading provider of collaboration software for teams, also didn’t fall behind in introducing new tools for DevOps. In March 2014, the company announced Atlassian Connect, a new distributed structure that allows third party developers to create additional modules in the programming language of their choice, and sell through Atlassian Marketplace.
Atlassian Connect features simple descriptors written in any programming language, which can be used by developers to create add-on. Third-party developers can quickly create secure and scalable add-ons for millions of Atlassian cloud-based customers and sell their products via Atlassian marketplace, thus providing developers a new source for revenue generation.
Atlassian also launched its product development solution called Atlassian Git Essentials–making it easier to measure workflow throughout the development of the project–from issues and code check-ins to build status and project progress. The goal is to optimize software development so that developers can spend their time writing awesome code and managers have critical insights needed to ensure on-time delivery.
ServiceNow
The emergence of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has forever changed how enterprises develop and launch innovative applications. At last year’s Knowledge14 conference, ServiceNow introduced ServiceNow Share, an online platform that allows ServiceNow customers and partners to run applications developed using the ServiceNow Service Automation Platform to upload and download applications and development data. Share offers developers the ability to build on existing content, share the content and accelerate the development of new applications.
ServiceNow believes the big opportunity for management strategies rests with enterprise service management. The company supports these initiatives and launched App Creator, a tool that allows business people without any knowledge of programming to develop self-services program.
Splunk
Like ServiceNow, Splunk last year announced a new DevOps platform aimed at mobile app developers and security experts designed to deliver insights into application behavior. The offering allows developers to see more of what’s going on in running applications and allows security analysts to obtain more comprehensive information about modern threats.
The company updated Splunk Enterprise to version 6.2 to make it easier for more people within the enterprise to use. Splunk’s vision is to expand DevOps culture and permit casual and less technical users to gain business insights from machine data. Splunk also announced Splunk MINT Express, its product that collects information about mobile apps based on BugSense technology. The technology gives developers data about the performance of their mobile apps, like crash information, daily active users, OS version, etc.
Splunk also rolled out Splunk MINT Enterprise, which combines the mobile data with Splunk’s enterprise data. By combining multiple data sources from web, mobile, server-side, database, network, etc. DevOps teams have a greater visibility of the entire system to better understand bottlenecks, failures, and discover root causes.
Going forward, 2015 will be the year of “smarter DevOps” with all the leading companies will look for smarter tools for automation, testing, deployment, and collaboration. The continued adoption of converged IT infrastructure means 2015 will be more virtualized, see more cloud, and delivery will occur on increasingly complex systems.