DevOps Methodology

The dynamic changes taking place in the world of technology impose more stringent requirements on modern companies for the speed of reaction, the time of release of releases of IT systems and the ability of specialists in various fields to openly communicate and collaborate fruitfully. The developers of built-in systems are not an exception. The demanded methodology of continuous delivery of solutions places special conditions on the organization of design processes, and testing ceases to be the final and isolated stage of the entire development cycle. However, the introduction of testing as a continuous parallel development and process support raises a lot of questions for the practice of such implementation.

The main goal of the transition to DevOps ideology is the desire to improve and speed up customer service. Reducing costs, increasing automation, improving configuration management, and executing business requests are just related tasks. At the same time, different types of organizations may need a different command structure for the effective interaction of Dev and Ops.

With the introduction of the DevOps methodology in 2009, which was supposed to answer a growing number of questions about the organization of active, continuous and productive interaction of IT specialists within the project, companies were divided into leaders and laggards depending on how well they managed to adapt the testing process to the declared principles.

DevOps is a relatively new concept and still lacks a clear, accepted definition. It is essentially a set of practices aimed at actively engaging and integrating development, testing and maintenance professionals. DevOps provides stable, fast, and reliable software deployment, including through continuous testing, which avoids delays and quality problems common to the classic design model.

The popularity of the methodology has increased significantly in recent years. According to RightScale 2016 State of the Cloud Report: DevOps Trends^[1], adoption of DevOps increased from 66% in 2015 to 74% in 2016, and among large organizations, adoption of the methodology is even higher at 81%.

The introduction of DevOps is not an easy task for many companies we surveyed: after all, new practice often requires a different way of thinking and a fundamental shift in corporate culture. Yet the benefits that DevOps and Agile promise developers, testers and the entire team far exceed any cost.

• Developers are involved in projects more efficiently
• Problems are identified in the early stages, and the cost of fixing them is reduced
• Accelerate the software development and deployment cycle
• And most importantly, as a result, customer satisfaction increases

Transformation of the system administrator profession under the influence of DevOps

The widespread adoption of the DevOps methodology will lead to the fact that those caused by imperfection of computer systems will disappear from the tasks of the sysadmin, the need for routine operations that do not require deep knowledge will disappear, and against this background, qualification requirements will increase (more).

DevOps command topology

What structure or topology of the DevOps command is appropriate for the organization depends on many questions, for example:

• What is the set of products produced and supported - the fewer products, the greater the relationship between Dev and Ops.
• Degree, strength and effectiveness of technical guidance - whether Dev and Ops share a common goal.
• Is the organization ready to transform the role of IT operation from "bring-submit" to the process built into the business.
• Whether the organization has leaders who are willing to point to areas of concern and accompany change.
• Most often, building a "dream team" will require a consistent change of several models.

MLOps

Main article: MLOps

Top trends

2020:10 forecasts for developers and DevOps for 2020

At the end of February 2020, IDC released forecasts for developers and DevOps. Analysts focused on the Chinese market, as well as practical recommendations for 2020 and subsequent years. The authors of the study believe that this work provides a comprehensive analysis of developer and DevOps market trends.

1. AI optimization for developers

According to IDC expectations, by 2024 companies' 56% will not limit the use of AI and machine learning to application development - they will be applied in design, quality management, security and deployment of new technologies. By 2023, 70% of companies will invest in retraining and training of employees, including third-party services, to acquire new skills and familiarize themselves with new methods of work.

Many companies use the DevOps methodology to speed up the release of applications

2. Widespread use of container platforms

By 2024, 70% of new applications will be deployed on container platforms to improve application deployment speed, consistency, and portability.

3. Increase in the share of freelance developers

By 2023, the number of part-time developers (including business analysts, data analytics and processing specialists, and data researchers) in China will double. In particular, the number of part-time developers will increase from 1.8 million in 2019 to 3.6 million.

4. DevOps as daily activities

By 2023, the number of organizations issuing codes for specific applications will increase from 3% to 30%. By 2024, at least 90% of new versions of enterprise-grade applications will have built-in AI features, although they will account for only 10% of the entire market.

5. Accelerate the transformation of traditional applications

By 2022, the accelerated modernization of traditional applications and the development of new applications will increase the share of cloud applications to 25%, due to the use of microservices, containers and dynamic orchestration.

6. DevOps focus on key business performance indicators

By 2023, 40% of DevOps teams will invest in tool expansion and focus on key business performance metrics such as cost and revenue as operations play a greater role in complex application performance and business impact.

7. Use of appropriate ON open source analytical tools

The growing reliance of applications on open source components has ensured the rapid growth of analytical tools. By 2023, tools for analyzing software components, which by February 2020 are used only by individual organizations, will be used by 45% of firms.

8. Companies create their own development ecosystems

By 2023, 60% of Chinese companies will create their own software ecosystems, and 50% will have access to key reusable code components from public libraries.

9. Growth of open access codebases

By 2024, the share of open source software sourced from their respective libraries will double, to 25%, and the remaining 75% will be tuned to organizations' business models or use cases.

When implementing these strategies, it is possible to use self-service resources, thanks to which the DevOps methodology allows development and testing in the cloud

10. DevOps Recognized Applicability

By 2024, apps that fully use DevOps will account for less than 35%. Businesses recognize that not all applications can benefit from complex operations that span development and production and involve continuous integration and continuous delivery.^[2]

Use in Russia

2024: Animation companies' revenue up 54% to reach $ ₽12,3 billion

The revenue of Russian animation companies in 2024 amounted to ₽12,3 billion, an increase of 54% over a five-year period. This was announced in April 2025 by the head of the Agency for Creative Industries of Moscow Gulnara Agamova.

She stressed that animation is one of the most promising sectors of the creative economy of Russia. A study conducted by the Creative Industries Agency demonstrates the steady growth of this segment over the past years.

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Фото: Freepik

Gulnara Agamova noted that the further development of the animation sphere will strengthen the creative economy of Moscow and form new growth points for other areas of creative business. An important step in this direction will be the opening in 2025 in Moscow of a cluster of video games and animation, which will be equipped with a recording studio and a motion design studio.

The creation of a specialized cluster has already aroused significant interest from the professional community - almost 20 animation studios have become interested in the opportunity to become residents. The head of the AKI emphasized: "Cluster residents will be able to use the cluster infrastructure, which captures the full cycle of development of animated and video game projects from prototyping to implementation. Events with the participation of international delegations, exhibitions, presentations and excursions will be organized for them. This will help companies develop their products outside Russia and find new customers abroad. "

The new cluster is intended to become the first profile association in Russia for animators and video game developers. The cluster format involves not only providing infrastructure for content production, but also creating conditions for networking, exchange of experience and search for new customers, including in the international market.

2020: How to find a good DevOps specialist, and why the search process can take a long time

The DevOps culture can develop in companies either evolutionarily, when employees understand that there are processes that can be automated, or in order to realize new business goals. But when a company needs to put new processes on the rails, it always requires specialists who can implement and develop the necessary tools. Finding DevOps engineers is a complex process. The IT specialist market is largely overheated now, so a person who would be suitable for the company and was ready to develop methodologies from scratch, it is not always possible to choose quickly. Read more here.

2019: Top trends in DevOps for 2020 from Forrester

In late November 2019, analytics firm Forrester published a study listing the top trends to expect in DevOps in 2020.

End of Plan, Build, Run Strategy

For a long time, the development of IT solutions was managed using an operating model called Plan, Build, Run (planning, creation, operation). Its main problem was insufficient flexibility. In the new digital world, breaks between developing and launching applications are unacceptable when experts must conduct quality checks.

Forrester publishes study listing top trends to expect in DevOps in 2020

According to experts, companies will abandon this model, including a phased structured process with decision-making at the end of each stage.

Continuous governance of corporate IT based on rules, dynamic control, and automation

The focus in 2020 will be on guidelines and more companies will use self-correcting dynamic controls. Automated platforms will be largely subordinate to management: template samples and environments used by product launch specialists will switch to automatic management, taking into account deviations from policy compliance.

Unstructured Organizational Models

Forrester believes that executives in charge of corporate information technology management at the company will encourage developers to make and keep promises when executing projects, but they will give them greater freedom in how to do so. The main question will not be "How to manage?," But "What?," The researchers predict.

Psychological safety

Following in Google's footsteps, leading companies will begin measuring psychological safety as a key measure of performance. I would not be surprised if risk managers note a low level of psychological safety as a serious organizational risk! In the same way that we predicted that chaotic development would become a recognized management strategy, will organizations implement appropriate measures in relation to organizational culture? - said one of the analysts at Forrester.

Forrester predicts tools measuring real-time performance and value of development teams will be widely used in 2020

Focus on Development Efficiency

Forrester predicts that tools measuring the performance and value of development teams in real time will be widely used in 2020. At the same time, the developers will pay special attention to such an indicator as customer satisfaction.

Moving to DevOps, the business gets several benefits. Among them:

Fast time to market (for example, shorter cycle times and faster deployments) Improved quality (e.g. increased availability, fewer failures, etc.) increase in organizational efficiency (for example, more time is spent on activities related to an increase in product value compared to losses, an increase in the amount of functionality transferred to the customer).

Training

Analysts of Forrester also consider that sets of tools of application development DevOps will include more often the built-in tutorials to allow developers to gain constantly new skills. This is because traditional learning tools such as books, online learning, video and offline courses are remote from the tools that developers actually use. Implementation of educational components development tools should speed up the programming process.^[3]

2017

Sberbank is hooked on flexible development: following Agile - the introduction of DevOps

Sberbank is introducing DevOps practices into the development of automated systems. As a consultant for this, the bank, following the results of the competition in July 2017, attracted McKinsey ^[4]].

From the tender documentation published by Sberbank, it followed that the bank is introducing DevOps in terms of sub-processes of continuous assembly, deployment and delivery (Continuous Integration, Delivery and Deployment). Automated systems for the implementation of DevOps from among the bank's target systems were to be selected in conjunction with McKinsey. Read more here.

Alfa-Bank accelerated IT development 60 times at the expense of DevOps culture

Alfa-Bank considers the introduction of a culture of flexible design one of its main achievements in IT in 2016. This follows from the bank's annual report, published at the end of June 2017.

{{quote 'In 2016, we took a big step towards DevOps culture - a culture of flexible design and integration of operational and design procedures - and were able to create in IT block an atmosphere steeped in the ideology of total automation, says the annual report.}}

Read more here.

Move IT Infrastructure to the Cloud

Global DevOps Market

Main article: Global DevOps Solutions Market

See also

• DevSecOps
• Agile software development
• Agile in Government Project Management
• Value Stream Management (VSM)
• Scrum
• Kanban
• Lean
• Super sets, relay races and racing on high-speed sports cars - sports agile approach to the project execution process

Notes