DevOps, or development operations, had perhaps its best year in 2014. Surges in affordable computing had finally laid the stage for software people to make the case that developers should be better linked to the operations side of the business – surprising revolutionary thinking in some quarters.

With more co-operation it was argued that processes could be refined and service updates be deployed more smoothly, and many firms were persuaded. By September last year more than half of firms across the UK, US and Australia had implemented some DevOps practices, according to research from cloud vendor Rackspace.

Yet that attention led to misinterpretation and even catastrophe, according to Clive Longbottom, analyst and founder of research firm Quocirca. "Vendors tried to shoehorn their existing portfolios into being DevOps," he said. "Users thought that it was all about allowing developers freedom to release code into the wild in a faster manner."

Good press, mixed response

Those failures have led to some cynicism among IT departments and other sections of businesses, arousing some resentment among those who advocate for DevOps.

"I think the cynicism is down to people’s perception of the function of it, and a lot about people’s own careers and the roles they have worked in," said Chris Jackson, CTO of DevOps service at Rackspace. "Sometimes there’s certain areas of the business where innovation can be looked down upon."

He drew the distinction between how DevOps operates in business and in the community that has been built around it, a situation he thought would be remedied if a large company stepped forward with a good story to tell about it. US retailer Target was claimed as one such example.

Other reasons have been offered for the persistent gap between business and IT. "Enterprise central IT departments are still struggling to keep up with demand for infrastructure and automation from developers, lines of business and other internal divisions," said Jay Lyman, research manager of cloud platforms at 451 Research.

"They still find themselves competing with public cloud, SaaS, open source software and other options that are easily accessible and low or no-cost to these internal divisions," he continued, adding that he had seen some evidence DevOps was alleviating the gap between business and IT.

Doing so effectively will be a key problem for many firms this year. Longbottom’s recommendation is that DevOps be implemented gradually, with strong feedback loops implemented so that the goals of IT and business are properly aligned.

Man against the machine

For some firms there is scepticism about the importance of DevOps when compared to automation and other emerging IT technologies. As Jackson acknowledges, changing people’s attitudes and culture is far harder than buying some new tin.

Among products set to be important to DevOps’ success this year, he points to configuration management, monitoring and app development tools, and is particularly impressed with Dataloop.io’s work in visualisation.

Lyman meanwhile claims that Ansible, Chef, Puppet Labs and SaltStack will be "key vendors" owing to more broad support of infrastructure automation, including networking, storage and Windows. Longbottom points to Serena Software ("a dark horse"), CA Technologies and also Rackspace, which has opened its DevOps tools to the public.

But modernising working practices is also a key aim for DevOps this year. "There’s been some ways of working that companies have got used to over the last 15 to 20 years that haven’t really be effective, but companies have got away with it," said Matthew Skelton, principal consultant at Skelton Thatcher, a technology consultancy.

He argued that now infrastructure is no longer a bottleneck, the distinguishing factor will be how developers and operations teams communicate – but not everyone is convinced. "I don’t think we’re in a position to say whether that’s a true statement or not," said Jackson. "It’s more about whether you can get good automation to speed your time to market."

The year of DevOps?

Aligning the interests of business and IT has been a lifelong struggle for the computing industry, and DevOps has arguably been a long time coming. "There’s nothing fundamentally new about DevOps," said Jackson. "It’s quite easy to read the ITIL [service management practices] book and see lots of concepts you see in DevOps."

Yet increasing complexity and fragmentation in IT arguably makes the subject more relevant than ever. "During the ‘good times’, positive cash flows hid a lot of business and IT problems," said Longbottom. "In more challenging times, it is imperative that every last bit of positive cash flow be optimised to ensure overall profitability.

"The winners will be those who get DevOps right. The losers won’t necessarily be those who don’t go DevOps, but those who get DevOps wrong."