DevOps World 2022: DevOps Tail Wags the Dog of Digital Business

As a methodology for building and deploying applications faster, DevOps has been around for more than a decade. But it’s only now that the methodologies and concepts pioneered years ago are starting to wag the dog of digital business transformation.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, digital business transformation has been all the rage. Organizations of all sizes now have a much deeper appreciation for digital processes that enable them to respond more adroitly to changing business conditions regardless of whether the global economy is expanding or contracting.

DevOps Wags the Dog

Not too long ago, ironically, business executives routinely complained that IT simply wasn’t fast enough to keep pace with the needs of the organization. At the CloudBees DevOps World 2022 conference in Orlando next month, it will be made crystal clear that businesses are now adopting concepts originally defined by DevOps pioneers to not only keep pace with the current rate of application development innovation but in many ways actually manage the business itself.

As Mitch Ashley, principal analyst for Techstrong Research, an arm of Techstrong Group, publisher of both DevOps.com and Digital CxO, recently noted during a podcast, “It’s all about the software.”

Of course, the shift in the relationship between IT and the business it supports has been a long time coming. The debate over how to close the divide between IT and the rest of business has been going on for decades. Even with the rise of DevOps, it’s been more than 11 years since the Jenkins continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform was officially launched. Today, advances in IT are now happening at a rate that many businesses are struggling to absorb.

In fact, what started out as small teams of application development and deployment specialists looking for ways to automate the building and deploying of applications has now evolved into a multi-billion dollar sector of the software industry. And it is driving a level of business transformation that hasn’t been seen since PCs running word processing and spreadsheet applications arrived in the 1980s.

Software is (Still) Eating the World

Just how big an impact DevOps is going to have going forward is still to be seen. It’s still early days as far as pervasive adoption of DevOps best practices is concerned but, as Marc Andreessen once noted, software continues to eat the world. Today, the bulk of that software is being constructed with DevOps best practices in mind and using everything from containers to serverless computing frameworks that make it simpler than ever to add new capabilities to applications both inside and outside of the cloud. The pace at which technological innovations are being made is only going to accelerate.

As such, it’s arguably never been more important for DevOps professionals to gather in person to share knowledge and insights. During the COVID-19 pandemic, DevOps platforms evolved tremendously. The teams that use those platforms exercise more influence than ever within their organizations. The best way to appreciate the value of DevOps has always been to learn firsthand how practitioners are employing those principles to achieve a wide range of strategic business goals.

No matter how large or small the organization, the need to embrace and then continuously improve DevOps processes and workflows is, as always, a pressing concern. Achieving that goal in isolation may be possible, but there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind there’s nothing quite like spending a few days with a few thousand like-minded souls to make attaining those goals a whole lot easier.

Want to learn more about this and other related topics? Join CloudBees for DevOps World 2022, held in Orlando, Florida, at the World Marriott Center. Use discount code DW22 when registering and get access to all the fantastic offerings, including keynotes, sessions, training and other interactive activities. We can’t wait to see you there for the DevOps Remix!