Although the devops movement is centered on reducing the friction between developers and operations teams and the ability for developers to deliver applications faster, neither outcome is possible without standardization. But are developers and operations teams ready to agree on standard environments?
Why both developers and operations teams are focused on devops
A recent post from Matt Asay, a longtime open source advocate now at cloud vendor Nodeable, links to an interesting survey of 750 people by Puppet Labs. One surprising finding is that although devops is often considered a developer-led movement, nearly four times as many operations staff and administrators responded to the survey as did developers. Also a surprise, as Asay points out, operations teams appear to see the same potential benefits from devops that developers do.
[ InfoWorld's Paul Krill explains what the devops movement is all about. | Follow the latest in open source developments and thinking with InfoWorld's Technology: Open Source newsletter. ]
In the survey, Puppet Labs finds that 55 percent of respondents ranked the automation of configuration and management tasks as the top benefit expected from the devops movement. Another 13 percent ranked it in their top three expected benefits.
You can't automate what you can't standardize
Given the rise of devops advocacy, I've spent time learning more about the interaction between developers and operations teams. One thing I've come to understand is that these two groups tend to think differently, even if they are using the same words and nodding in agreement.
It's no surprise developers want to adopt tools and processes that allow them to become more efficient in delivering new applications and continuous updates to existing applications. Today, these two tasks are hindered to a degree by the operations teams that are responsible for production environments. As Asay points out in his post, developers seek automation. (As an aside, that's why enterprise developers have been very open to using public clouds.)
