Demand for faster product development and quick market release created a need for increased collaboration between Development (Dev) and Operations (Ops) teams, which eventually led to “DevOps.” With this, transition to DevOps has become one of the key points of discussion across many IT firms. This article gives you an overview of the demand and trend for organizations to transition to DevOps.
Rise in IT innovation and burgeoning digital revolution have led to the demand for faster development and quicker releases to stand out in the IT competitive scenario. This transition eventually led to a new culture that saw collaboration between two key IT teams, development and operations teams, which the industry calls DevOps.
DevOps established a new style of IT functioning, easing different phases of software process from product development to testing and final market release, all in a rapid and reliable way.
Why DevOps Transition?
Rapid delivery of independent software components and continuous integration of the same with production systems forms the key principle behind DevOps functioning.
DevOps is often confused with Agile methodology. Though they share similarities in providing improved IT performance through rapid development, DevOps stands apart from Agile because of its efficacy in the software deployment phase, ensuring a constant communication between the two teams. Thus, DevOps is often termed as a successor to Agile.
A collaborative approach, key for information exchange across the line, is one of the major factors driving firms to undergo DevOps implementation.
Though DevOps is well-known as a merger of development and operations teams, an effective DevOps model extends beyond that to other key functional areas of organizations.
Breaking the old trend of limiting individual teams to their respective work domains, DevOps brought in a scope for knowledge-sharing among them, wherein developers can extend themselves to testing and deployment and operations team members can upgrade their skill set, learning new languages, architectures and tools.
Increased Demand for DevOps Resource
Transition to DevOps holds a key demand in the fast-growing IT market, wherein managing with the existing infrastructure or resource plays an almost equal role as coming up with something new.
Greenfield projects aside, DevOps deployment is most often seen in brownfield projects that encourage building on the existing resources.
With this situation in place, there is also a lot of demand for DevOps resources across firms. The “2017 Open Source Jobs Report” from the Linux Foundation shows 60 percent demand for DevOps human resources among more than 2,000 IT open source professionals and IT hiring managers.
This clearly shows the level of demand that transition to DevOps is holding in the IT industry.
“If there isn’t an existing DevOps role within your company, software developers should spend time sitting with the operations team or vice versa to understand how their processes work and how they can be improved through collaboration,” said Mike Durney, CEO of the job-hunting site Dice.
The report found:
- Nearly 50 percent of hiring managers are keen about those DevOps resources with professional credentials such as relevant certifications
- More than 47 percent of the companies are ready to fund certification programs for their existing personnel
- 42 percent of companies are keen on adding DevOps skills to their hiring portfolio
- “DevOps Engineer” profile ranks second in Glassdoor’s Best 50 jobs in America
Despite its advantages, however, DevOps has a few challenges to overcome related to application integration, test automation, budget and skill set, among others.
— Veritis