I still hear a good deal of skepticism about DevOps. There’s an acknowledgement that it may be appropriate for small teams or startups, but some doubt about its applicability in established companies.

A recent Gartner case study by Cameron Haight* looks at an effort undertaken by National Instruments to implement a new SaaS model. NI ended up automating their deployments and configuration with a model based strategy, cloud based hosting and increasing developer-operations cooperation.

What I find most interesting in this example is how normal it is. NI started before DevOps was a well known philosophy. But when you look at the problem space of trying to deliver new products quickly, and are willing to be bold in your solution design, the same patterns appear over and over. DevOps, if anything, is a recognition of a successful pattern that has played out over and over again.

Deployment docs and manual deployments are just too slow in many real-world scenarios. So we end up needing to automate. Because infrastructure, application code and application configuration are inter-related, a model of the complete system is created and updates use that model and an automation language of some sort to apply changes. Getting to this point encourages developers and system admins to collaborate lowering the “wall” and animosity between these two groups.

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*  ”Case Study: DevOps Used at National Instruments” Cameron Haight Nov 2011

Source: http://blogs.urbancode.com/devops/gartner-on-real-world-devops/