Why 2016 is going to be the year of DevOps
The key to understanding the emerging DevOps market lies in understanding that it's importance is all about the people who are doing it and the culture around them, rather than the tools and technology being used, according to the analysts Gartner.
That being so, it is still a market that is set to grow from last year's $1.9bn to a hefty $2.3bn this year. Next year, Gartner says, it will move from being a niche strategy employed by large cloud providers to becoming "a mainstream strategy employed by 25 per cent of Global 2000 organisations".
In elaborating on its theme, Gartner went on to point out, in its latest research report, that it views DevOps a virtual and likely time-limited market and as a result it has focused the scope of its own definition of the market onto the tools that support DevOps and the practices associated with it.
All this "in the context of continuous delivery, continuous improvement, infrastructure and configuration as code, and so on", Gartner said.
So rather than setting out some recommended Dev-Ops tools, Gartner has set up a specification for tools that are DevOps-ready, DevOps-enabled and/or DevOps-capable.
"Predictably," the analysts say, DevOps-ready tools "have seen and will continue to see the largest growth". These are the tools that are designed to be built out-of-the-box and are ready to support what Gartner describes as "the DevOps characteristics and traits".
And Gartner further points out that most DevOps-enabled and capable tools currently exist as part of the larger IT operation and development environment but that this will likely change.
As Gartner says, DevOps "goes way beyond implementation and technology management" and is all about people within organisations "developing a deeper focus on how to effect positive organisational change". The key DevOps philosophy is about people, process, technology and information and in that order, with people first.
"The overall DevOps message is compelling, because many IT organisations want to achieve the scale-out and economies of scale achieved by world-class cloud providers," according to Laurie Wurster, research director at Gartner. But there are still several gaps that prevent implementation of DevOps, Wurster said.
"Businesses have acknowledged these gaps and have begun assessing how the DevOps mindset might apply to their own environments," she said, but "culture is not easily or quickly changed [and the] key to the culture within DevOps is the notion of becoming more agile and changing behavior to support it ".
There is a Gartner paper "Market Trends: DevOps -- Not a Market, but a Tool-Centric Philosophy That Supports a Continuous Delivery Value Chain" which you can see details of here.
Further Reading:
AWS opens up DevOps engineer certification exam to public
Enterprise understanding of DevOps expands, but has a long way to go
Survey: IT development, operations teams really do deliver when working together
2015: the year to light a fire under DevOps
Chef and HP work to bring DevOps to the enterprise