Closing the Developer Skill Gap

Introduction

The current scenario of the IT industry is impacted by the cascading effect that technological advancements have had throughout history. New chunks of technology arise from time to time that wipes off the way the world functions. More recently, technological advances have begun to spur at a lightning pace. Ever since the advent of the internet, the spread of information and the rate of development of newer technologies has only risen manifolds.

Cloud computing witnessed another shift in technology that continues to influence the way businesses operate as new applications for tech are invented. Blockchain is yet another example of newer technological advancements that has infinite potential to upset the way many industries deal with their business from banking to real estate and even the video game industry. While new technologies change the software industry, so too can cultural shifts.

What is DevOps?

DevOps — the amalgamation of development (Dev) and operations (Ops) teams — is a corporate approach that ensures faster development of applications and easy maintenance of already existing deployments. By assuring organizations to create beautiful bonds between Dev, Ops and other stakeholders in the business, DevOps lays the ground for more crisp, more controllable actions by adopting best practices, automation and newer innovative tools. It is a set of practices that amalgamates software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops), resulting in the fast flow of structured work (i.e., exorbitant deploy rates), while simultaneously increasing the reliability, stability, the resilience of the production environment. It objects to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide regular and prompt delivery with high software quality. DevOps is complementary with Agile software development; several DevOps methodologies and ideas came from the Agile methodology.

The summary of the ‘State of DevOps’ report shows that the ability to develop and render software efficiently and accurately is a key indicator and value driver for all businesses — for-profit, not-for-profit, informative, and government organizations alike. If a company wants to give value, no matter how they measure it, DevOps is how they will do it.

Another survey on ‘The State of IT Modernization’ by IDG instated that only 26% of the organizations have completed their initial stages of the IT revolution, but they too are seeing significant ramifications on business operations. The benefits that they are reaping include superior quality of service, better client experience/contentment, expenditure management, uptime, and formation of new revenue-generating products and services.

History

If DevOps had a birth certificate, the father’s name would be inked as Patrick Debois. Patrick was intrigued by learning IT from every direction and formed a community for other people to post their thoughts on how to solve this divide between development and operations in 2007–08.

Initially, the interest was petty and not a whole lot came of it but he started gathering more and more developers and system admins to put their heads together to discuss the best ways to start sealing the gap between the two unrelated fields.

He named his event DevOpsDays which sparked lively debates over Twitter And rose the hashtag DevOps. In March of 2011, Cameron Haight of Gartner presented his predictions for the trajectory of DevOps over the next decade. His positive outlook on its impact on the industry led to more focus on the DevOps movement, and it wasn’t long before businesses of all sizes were starting to adopt these new methods. DevOps had officially caught on as the next wind of change since Agile for the IT industry.

Challenges

With its initiation, DevOps’ path was not without roadblocks. Amongst a lot of challenges faced, the primary ones were:

• Overcoming the Dev versus Ops psyche
• Traversing from legacy infrastructure to microservices
• Too much attention on tools
• Resilience to change
• Dev and Ops toolset incompatibility

Benefits

DevOps has found a place for itself in almost all sizes of business today due to its micro functionality and prompt delivery. Here are some benefits of DevOps and why it is preferred by millions.

1. Prompter delivery time: The main pillars of DevOps — automation, pauseless delivery, and fast feedback cycle — aim to make a software development process speedier and more accurate. Being a remarkable stretch of Agile technology, DevOps makes use of automation to ensure a smooth flow of the SDLC. By promoting an adaptive culture, it offers the glimmer for quick and continuous feedback so that any glitches are fixed in time and the releases are done faster.
2. High collaboration between teams (Business/Dev/Ops): Today, more than ever before, development teams need to break down their inter-departmental silos and communicate in a dynamic, round–the–clock platform. DevOps draws the way to improve business fluency by providing the much–needed air of mutual collaboration, communication, and association across globally–distributed groups in an IT organization. The already set boundaries based on roles are lining in such an encouraging DevOps environment. All team members, together, are responsible for delivering the required stuff in order.
3. Better client experiences: With DevOps, organizations can improve their release frequency by 200x, recovery times by 24x, and decrease change failure rates by 3x. By automating the delivery pipeline, it becomes probable to enhance the reliability and stability of an application after every new deployment. When the applications work flawlessly in production, organizations reap the benefit of Better client experiences.
4. Early malfunction detection: The collective DevOps environment imbibes a culture of knowledge sharing across the groups. The automated, constant monitoring and regular testing of the code help improve the overall build quality. Teams are empowered to share their thoughts for early defect resolution.
5. Continuous Release and Deployment: Today’s software development practices demand groups to continuously deploy high-quality software, decrease go-to-market timelines, and redesign shorter release cycles. DevOps recruits this thorough automation. Automated CI/CD pipeline lets the Dev and Ops teams develop and deploy code almost automatically. Further, when QA is embedded and automated, it handles the quality part of the code. Thus overall, DevOps enhances better efficiency, higher quality, and faster & continuous deployments.
6. Creative mindset: DevOps streamlines processes, produces efficient releases, and maintains quality builds. This means the deployment phases are easily flowing, the workers are better rested, and there is immense hope for bringing a creative approach for resolving issues.

The Future Of DevOps

Automation will continue to play a pivotal role in the DevOps revolution, and artificial intelligence for IT operations that’ll help organizations achieve their DevOps objectives. The core elements of AIOps — machine learning, performance streamlining, anomaly detection, automated root cause analysis (RCA) and future insights — work together to accelerate routine operational tasks. This upcoming technology, which can transform how IT operations teams manage alerts and resolve issues, will be a crucial component of the future of DevOps. In addition to using data science and computational techniques to automate cumbersome tasks, AIOps also delivers metrics and uses inference models to pull actionable insights from data

And irrespective of what advanced technologies the future brings, organizations will need to realize that DevOps is all about the journey and that the organization’s DevOps-related goals and expectations are.