DevOps: Why Now? (http://bit.ly/d6hT7N)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) March 5, 2010 -- There’s tremendous passion surrounding this burgeoning DevOps movement, which aspires to address the longstanding bottleneck between development and operations. It’s no surprise, because the cause is worthwhile: This bottleneck is the primary barrier to agility, responsiveness and delivering business value.

But more than a few have raised the question: How in the world is this new? It’s a fair question; dev and ops have long been divided by conflicting cultures, goals, processes and tools. And the motivation to bridge this gap is far from new.

What is new is an organized movement to shine a light on the problem space and emerging solution patterns. A community is finally organizing around the issue.

But why now? Because the time is right—for several reasons:

Lean mandates—last year’s crushing recession forced us to do more with less. Automation became the necessary alternative to headcount. It also made us smarter and more efficient at scaling without adding people. This is one of the reasons that economists are predicting a “jobless recovery” in 2010. Automation remains necessary and very much in vogue.

The need for speed—IT as competitive advantage is nothing new, but many companies are realizing that the velocity created by Agile hits a brick wall when it comes time to deploy an application—which is when business value is realized. That’s why agility needs to be extended into the operational context. At the same time, emerging self-service and elastic computing initiatives dictate the need for zero-latency provisioning—automated, policy-driven and conflict-free.

Crushing scale—IT is staring down a tidal wave of scale as systems transition from physical to virtual to cloud. What they’re realizing is that these new architectures are a cap ex boon and an op ex bust—every dime of ROI realized could be washed out by attendant growth in op ex costs as the management burden is shifted to these new architectures, which promise compounding growth in system volume.

And each of these pressures converges on the gap between dev and ops.

So, is the pain new? No, but it’s more acute than ever and it’s only getting worse.

That’s why the time is right for DevOps.

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