“Marley was dead, to begin with.” So begins my DevOps Christmas Carol. In this reflection, I am visited by the ghosts of DevOps past, present and future. I hope that, after hearing my story, you will have a better understanding of where DevOps is going based upon where it came from and where it is now.
The Ghost of DevOps Past
The ghost of DevOps past took me back to Las Vegas, 2012. I shared a bottle (or two) of wine with Gene Kim, Gene was talking about a manuscript for a book he was working on based on The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt. It was a digital story of resource constraints and the way forward based on something called DevOps. I was fascinated by this new way of thinking about development and operations while musing about what a great thing that could be for security, which was my thing then. A whole new world opened up to me as I met and learned about the work of people like Patrick Dubois, John Willis, Jez Humble, Damon Edwards and more.
I was taken to Boulder, Colorado where Foundry Group and Techstars were putting on a symposium to make sure their portfolio companies were smart about DevOps. The CTO of Rally software did a presentation on Agile and DevOps and, again, it was like looking at the IT world from a whole new vantage point. It was after speaking to some of my friends, Rajat Bhargava and Brad Feld, that the idea for what became DevOps.com was born.
What a golden time that was. DevOps was an elusive thing. No manifesto, no official definition. Some people said it was mythical and not real. Others said it was just for startups born in the cloud. Still others said it was just for large enterprises. DevOps, it seemed, could be everywhere and nowhere, all at once.
Looking back, it was an exhilarating time, with philosophical arguments vigorously debated. And over the weeks, months and years that followed, the idea of DevOps became a real thing, the benefits it provided revealed themselves and a set of best practices emerged. My partners at the DevOps Institute and I tried to capture these emerging best practices and build courseware and certifications around them. Oh, my—what a sh*tstorm that created. The idea of being certified in DevOps was scoffed at, derided, spit on and ridiculed. But that, too, eventually passed. Looking back at this part of my trip, I realized that while it all seemed idealistic and exciting and despite the ups and downs and bumpy road, we were always moving forward.
The Ghost of DevOps Present
Next, the ghost of DevOps present visited me. In this dream, DevOps had begun to blend into the woodwork. For the most part, it was an accepted way of developing and operating software. Many principles such as CI/CD, continuous testing, SRE and DevSecOps were mainstream. While not 100% fully adopted, the majority of organizations used some DevOps patterns in their business.
It had become so mundane, in fact, that people began to ask, “Has DevOps hit the wall?” “Has DevOps passed its peak?” and “What’s next for DevOps?” While this may sound ominous, it is actually par for the course in the adoption cycles of new technologies. As certain as the Gartner hype cycle, technology that has settled into the stack seems to be the way of things. So as much as the ghost of DevOps present tried to frighten me, I was unafraid. Adoption was proceeding just as expected. It was firmly entrenched as part of digital transformation initiatives. Cloud-native and DevSecOps also were becoming more and more accepted.
The Ghost of DevOps Future
Next, I was visited by the ghost of DevOps future. She showed me a glimpse of what the future held. In this future version, SREs worked side-by-side with DevOps teams. There was a smooth handoff at the time of deployment ensuring that apps behaved the way they were intended. Automated feedback loops allowed developers to incorporate lessons learned into future versions.
Low-code/no-code solutions designed for developers allowed for even faster, automated deployments. AI-enabled applications let testing keep pace with development, more automation enabled even faster deployments.
AI also made observability more than just a spectator sport. Actionable intelligence that was wisely acted upon was the norm in this future. Of course, security was still an issue. There were even more regulations and compliance requirements. The bad guys were as notorious as ever. It seems even a DevOps future where security was everyone’s responsibility could not fully solve our security issues. But, overall, progress had been made.
DevOps teams were deploying directly from Git onto cloud-native stacks that started with Kubernetes but didn’t end there. There were service meshes and APIs connecting everything. Serverless platforms were offered by most vendors. Overall, no one wanted to be locked into one cloud provider and picked the right cloud for each project. Indeed, DevOps in the future seemed on the verge of recognizing and achieving many of its aspirations.
I awoke and felt good about everything that was happening with DevOps. In the words of Tiny Tim from that other Christmas carol, “God bless us, every one!”
