2012: The Year of DevOps

operations staff and enterprise architects, to understand and work toward a common operational infrastructure for your organization. Second, as implied earlier, operations and support people should be recognized as key stakeholders of the solution being worked on. Third, the team should focus on the overall solution, not just the software. With a solutions focus we recognize that software is clearly important, but we may also do the following: Provide new or upgraded hardware that supports documentation—including operations and support procedures; change the business or operational processes that stakeholders follow; and even help change the organizational structure in which our stakeholders work. Fourth, your process should include an explicit governance strategy. Effective governance strategies motivate and enable development teams to leverage and enhance the existing infrastructure, follow existing organizational conventions, and work closely with enterprise teams—all of which help to streamline operations and support of the delivered solutions.

DevOps is an exciting idea that you’re going to be hearing a lot more about in 2012. Granted, there’s likely going to be a lot of talk and little action within most organizations due to the actual scope of DevOps, but a few years from now, we’ll look back on 2012 as the year when DevOps really started to take off.  Now that many organizations have successfully adopted agile strategies to improve their development activities, they will turn to the larger picture of improving their IT strategy as a whole; DevOps is an important aspect of doing exactly that. I wish you and yours a joyful and prosperous New Year.