The Biggest Change to DevOps

To gather insights on the state of the DevOps movement in 2017, we talked to 16 executives from 14 companies who are implementing DevOps in their own organization and/or providing DevOps solutions to other organizations.

Here's what they told us when we asked, "How has DevOps changed since you began using the methodology?"

• DevOps has gone from being new and different to the “new normal.” It’s expected that you’ll implement a DevOps methodology.
• NoOps may not be for everyone, like monolithic code running on hardware, but I do believe we’ll see more automation and NoOps to solve problems faster. People will be taking existing software and automating by building a new stack on top the monolith – an API layer around the monolith.
• The quality of releases has changed. Do not build code in random workflows. Moving build through the cycle of developing, building, QA, and testing to deploy faster and with more confidence.
• It’s less of a missionary sell today. There are so many success stories beyond the unicorns. Evidence that it works is the State of DevOps Report produced by Puppet. DevOps outperforms any other methodology by a significant margin. DevOps is causing serious disruption in the industry – even in enterprise companies, with legacy systems, that are willing to make the change.
• We’ve moved from just tearing down the walls to promote collaboration between development and operations to breaking down all walls including support, sales, and marketing so we can meet the needs of all departments. Marketing needs to know the usage data of the product. Adding this information later in the process can hurt the speed of the product. Design everyone’s requirements in up front. Everyone has a seat at the table to let everyone else know what they need. Sales hears what’s going on with the rest of the business.
• I think the main change has been a change of attitude. Continuously delivering updates into the production environment used to be disdained and called "cowboy coding;" now, it's understood that it makes sense to do this if you do it right.
• It hasn’t. It’s still about people collaborating with people and finding a better get something developed. We moved from bottom-up to include top-down because senior management gets results. A better work environment is able to see straight through the pipeline. We designated people to make it happen. Make accommodations for larger enterprises. Adopt new approaches for enterprise DevOps with a vastly distributed team.
• The toolchain has completely changed in the last two to three years. There’s a conflict between switching to new solutions that keep coming out. We now have a four person DevOps team consistently improving tools to make developers happy, more frictionless for developers. We want to focus on the biggest problem to solve right now rather than the latest tools.
• There used to be a lot of manual processes. Now we set up automation up front to optimize build time versus set-up and onboarding. We expect new developers to push their first commit on day one.
• Testing has become a more important part of the process. It’s being rolled out in the development stage. Tests are created for all elements of the development process. QA and QM are using unit test cases. Since we’re releasing faster, we see a greater role in creating more services. Also, Test Environment Management challenges are important. We automate as much as we can with continuous integration. Cross platform application development and deployment is becoming important. We're moving to cross-platform environments. We're not restricted to Windows. We're moving from monoliths to microservices since they’re easily managed and updated. Automation removes a lot of management.
• There’s always a problem between developers, operations, and infrastructure. The change in applications has become more evident. The perception is that DevOps is a toolkit for start-ups. However, it’s very applicable to enterprises who do not want to get rid of legacy infrastructure but do want to figure out how to apply DevOps principle to managing their legacy systems.
• The realization of Dev/Sec/Ops. There is more concern with security today and some companies have been burnt by the process with slow or inaccurate security checks. We need to address this in a way that enables short and fast feedback loops that are automated.
• There's improved communications with IT operations and the developers, who are able to communicate their needs to operations.
• There's more focus on containers and replicable builds to scale, share, and collaborate with. There's more use of container schedulers like Kubernetes.

What have been the biggest changes to DevOps from your perspective?

By the way, here's who we spoke to! 

1. Michael Schmidt, Senior Director, Automic

2. Amit Ashbel, Director of Product Marketing and Cyber Security Evangelist, Checkmarx 

3. Sacha Labourey, CEO and Founder, CloudBees

4. Samer Fallouh, V.P. Engineering, Dialexa

5. Andrew Turner, Senior Architect, Dialexa

6. Andreas Grabner, Technology Strategist, Dynatrace

7. Anders Wallgren, CTO, Electric Cloud 

8. Job von der Voort, V.P. of Product, GitLab 

9. Charles Kendrick, CTO, Isomorphic Software 

10. Craig Lurey, CTO and Co-Founder, Keeper Security 

11. Josh Atwell, Developer Advocate, NetApp SolidFire

12.  Joan Wrabetz, CTO, Quali

13.  Joe Alfaro, V.P. of Engineering, Sauce Labs 

14. Nikhil Kaul, Product Marketing Manager Testing, SmartBear Software 

15. Harsh Upreti, Product Marketing Manager API, SmartBear Software 

16. Andi Mann, Chief Technology Advocate, Splunk