The 2016 Report on the state of DevOps

The annual State of DevOps Report affirms as well as highlights the fact that acquiring higher Information Technology an organizational performance is a team effort that spans operations and development. Furthermore, it is also an investment that could deliver powerful returns. The report for this year reveals the way of boosting the whole product lifecycle. The lifecycle includes initial planning of a product, the quality and security assurance to customer feedback that hastens delivery and at the same time boosting customer feedback, speeds up delivery while boosting security, quality and business outcomes.

We have surveyed over 25,000 technical professionals over the past five years. This makes the State of DevOps Report the most extensive study on the DevOps topic nowadays. This year, we surveyed over 4,600 tech professionals worldwide. Again, we saw a boost in response from those who are working in DevOps department than last year. Unfortunately, there was just a slight increase in respondents who are female, and we have observed the same in other surveys. Admittedly, there is still a lot of work to be done to improve the inclusiveness and diversity in DevOps.

In the report of the State of DevOps, the following key findings are revealed:

1. Organizations that are high-performing are fiercely outperforming the lower-performing peers when it comes throughput. High performers deploy 200 times more often compared to lower performers, with 2,555 times quicker lead times. Moreover, they also continue to remarkably outdo low performers, with 24 times faster times of recovery and tree times lower rates of change failure.

2. High performers have better loyalty on their employees, as measured by eNPS or employee Net Promoter Score. Employees in high-performing firms recommend their company to a friend as a great work place, and 1.8 times more likely to recommend their team as a great working environment. Other studies showed that this is correlated with better business results.

3. Enhancing quality is everyone’s job. High performing companies spend 22 percent less time on rework and unplanned work. Thus, they’re able to spend 29 percent more time on new work, like for instance new code or features. They’re able to do this since they create quality into every step of the development process via using continuous delivery practices, rather than retrofitting quality at the end of the development cycle.

4. High performers spend 50 percent less time in remedying security concerns than low performers. Through better integration of information security objectives to day-to-day work, teams gain higher IT performance levels and create systems that are more secure.

5. Taking an experimental approach towards development of product. This could boost IT as well as organizational performance. The product development cycle begins long before a developer starts coding. The ability of the product team to decompose features and products into small batches, offer visibility into the workflow.

The survey analysis showcased that using continuous delivery practices as well as lean product management practices have predicted the extent to which people agreed with these statements and whether the culture of an organization was performance-oriented and generative. Moreover, the extent in the way people identified with their company predicted a performance-oriented and generative culture as well as predicted organizational performance as measured when it comes to market share, productivity and profitability. This should not surprise us. If the greatest asset of a company are the people, and most corporate leaders claim that they are, then having employees who identify strongly with the company must prove a competitive edge.

Netflix’s cloud architect by Adrian Cockcroft, was once asked by a senior leader in a Fortune 500 company where he got his wonderful people from. Cockcroft replied that ‘I hired them from you’, making our analysis clear. In the rapidly-moving and competitive world these days, the best thing to do for the products, company and people is to institute a culture of learning and experimentation and to also invest in the management and technical capacities which allow it.

Traditionally, IT has been considered as a cost center, which make it difficult to persuade management to invest in enhancements. Until recently, there has been little evidence that investments in IT could offer considerable returns. In past reports, we showed that there is a predictive relationship between organizational and IT performance, which prove that Information Technology could deliver true business value and provide different organizations a competitive advantage.

In the survey this year, we found that high-performing teams spend the least time on unplanned work and rework, approximately 21 percent. ROI calculations are based on the savings expected. This we expressed in monetary systems, but it is necessary to bear in mind that when it comes to saving employees time, you’re giving them back the space to experiment, think and to be innovative and creative.

Today, DevOps is no longer just a buzzword or a fad but an understood set of cultural patterns and practices. People turn to DevOps not only to improve their daily working time and spend quality time for the family, but also to boost the performance, revenues and profitability of their organizations as well. We have launched the State of DevOps and the DevOps survey report five years ago in order to discover just how the system’s tools, cultural values and practices have impacted IT teams and the companies that they serve. This year, the data gathered were wider in range and more deeply analyzed. We hope that the analysis, findings and guidance in this report helps in the better understanding of the potential impact of DevOps to any organization.

Home automation and the Internet of Things

The fast expansion of connected devices, or the Internet of Things technology as is often called, is extremely exciting. By connecting the devices, we gain more control than ever before. For instance, one could adjust the thermostat at home from the office, check security cameras from a movie theater or turn lights off from just about anywhere, whether one is just next door or across the globe.

As daily devices are increasingly finding their way on the web, there is a plethora of things around the home that are becoming smarter, mainly owing to a new-found ability to connect to the web. Home automation is a process of automatically controlling appliances at home with the use of different control system techniques. The electronic and electrical appliances in a home, such as outdoor lights, lights, fans, fire alarm, kitchen timer and many more could be controlled using different control techniques. There are several techniques to control home appliances. One great example is an IoT based home automation over the cloud, home automation under WiFi via Android applications from any smart phone device, and more.

As more and more manufacturers, like LG, Samsung, Panasonic and many more build connected products, the intent is to help simplify lives. Nonetheless, while it is the ultimate goal, it becomes hard to achieve once you realize that these devices are not actually connected to one another. This is where home automation steps in to deliver the promise of simplifying people’s lives. Connecting devices via an operating system not just simplifies control over various devices, but actually connects the devices to each other as well, regardless of the brand. With IoT, a single application from a smart phone enables one to control everything. And the real magic occurs when these devices are programmed to do a function that is based on the location or actions of another device. Getting out of bed in mornings could trigger music to start playing and the coffer maker to start brewing coffee.

The growing usage of home automation technology through IoT has the potential for considerable energy savings and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. A study finds that the widespread adoption of home automation products such as circuit, temperature and lighting control, when used for energy savings intents, could collectively prevent up to 100 million tons of CO2 emissions. Furthermore, it could lower primary residential consumption of energy by as much as 10 percent.

Research proves that innovation consumer technology could deliver into the homes via IoT could significantly lower the carbon footprint. With a simple touch of a button or screen, one could control and manage home more effectively and more easily than ever, virtually from just about anywhere in the world. Home automation technology delivers potential benefits to utilities too, like for instance, an enhanced demand response capacities and intelligent homes segmentation. Actual energy savings will depend on how a user strongly opt to control the automated home equipment and devices. When activated, intelligent features enable greater savings. For example, smart thermostats could learn when certain rooms in a home do and do not need conditioning to save energy without having to sacrifice comfort. Furthermore, energy savings could potentially be higher when the devices are used together, just like with a whole-home control.

The sales of a lot of home automation technologies are projected to grow in the next few years. Consumer trends showed that the key motivator behind buying automated products, like smart blinds, thermostats and light fixtures, has been for convenience, entertainment and/or security. Further boosting the marketability of the products to homeowners through promoting energy savings potential can lead to more energy savings anywhere.

Complete home automation systems have a lot of security benefits. They allow a homeowner to check in on the home from another location, providing genuine peace of mind. Some systems allow for interacting with a home security system, providing one the ability to arm and disarm the home remotely. Some complete automation systems would alert a homeowner by text, phone or email if there are unusual movements within the home. Home automation products offer convenience and save both time and effort when doing household chores. With proper energy management, one could reduce energy consumption, which or course could help save money. Possibly and perhaps most importantly, complete home automation enables a homeowner to customize the home to fit the unique needs and lifestyle of the family. Complete home automation may sound costly and complex, but a lot of systems surprisingly are affordable and are simple to install.

The DevOps thing

DevOps is a movement that stops the waste of money and time to start delivering great software and building lasting systems. DevOps believe that there’s a better way of creating teams and software that can solve issues of a system.

THE DEVOPS MOVEMENT

DevOps is a movement that stops wasting time, money to begin delivering great software and creating lasting systems. The movement is created around a group of people who believe that the app of a combination of the right technology and attitude could revolutionize the software development and delivery environment. The movement is bold enough to believe that there is a better way of building teams and software that could solve system problems.

The DevOps movement is characterized by people who possess a multidisciplinary skill set, persons who are comfortable with configuration and infrastructure, but at the same time happy to roll up their sleeves, debug, write tests and ship features. These are people who make connections since they could, because they have feet in numerous camps, they could be peace makers, ambassadors, facilitators, and communicators. The point of the movement is to encourage people, compare ideas, train, recruiting and popularizing this method of doing IT.

The DevOps movement is attempting to encourage development of understanding the domain which the software is written, communication skills and crucially, a passion and sensitivity for the underlying business and for ensuring that it would succeed. Born of the need to boost IT service delivery agility, the movement puts emphasis on collaboration, communication and integration between software developers and Information Technology operations. DevOps recognizes the interdependence of IT operations and software development and helps a business create software and IT services faster, with frequent iterations.

Organizations that integrate DevOps practices get more done, simple and plain. They deploy code up to thirty times more often than the competition. Collaboration across the various roles deliver a lot of benefits.

TECHNICAL BENEFITS OF DEVOPS

1. Less complex issue to fix
2. Continuous software delivery
3. Faster solution to problems

BUSINESS BENEFITS OF DEVOPS

1. More stable operating systems
2. Faster features delivery
3. More time available for adding value

THE NEW WORLD OF DEVOPS

DevOps is not just another Information Technology buzzword. It is here to stay. A big majority of businesses either have already implemented DevOps practices or planning to implement them. It is characterized by operations staff that make use of a lot of the same techniques as developers for their systems work. The idea is that rather than avoiding each other in the work place, the development and operations people must learn to work together in numerous cooperation.

DEVOPS AFFINITIES WITH AGILE AND LEAN APPROACHES

DevOps has strong affinities with Agile and Lean approaches. It could be interpreted as agile outgrowth. Agile development prescribes close collaboration of clients, developers, product management and at times QA to fill in the gaps and iterate quickly towards a better product. Simply, DevOps is extending Agile principles beyond the code boundaries to the whole service delivered.

WHY DEVELOPERS SHOULD WANT DEVOPS?

DevOps is great for developers. There are three principal reasons that a developer would want to work in an organization that is DevOps-oriented. Developers who work in DevOps-mode receive lesser calls in the middle of the night for resolving production problems. This is because they see problems before they become catastrophic issues because of an orientation of proactive monitoring instead of reactive alerts.

In a traditional software process, once a software is developed, it is ‘thrown over the wall’ to QA, which throws it over later to another wall to production. Thus, what the end-user ultimately sees could be a bit different from what a developer wrote. But, under the DevOps model, what a developer writes goes live since one continues to have access and visibility to the code even after it goes to QA and production. In other words, developers own the code delivery from creation to implementation.

Developers, such as most human beings, get greater satisfaction from work with relevance in the real world. As the developers in a traditional organization are isolated, often they work on simulated problems in made-up use scenarios and they just find out that these approximations were wrong when something will break. In a DevOps model, the scenarios are real. For instance, environments are load tested before they are put into production to determine if they work correctly. Another instance is that test scripts are, themselves tested for realism via being deployed in a production environment, not only test labs. Sharing the test results with developers provide them the chance to see how their code will perform under real-life scenarios.

DevOps need an orchestra leader. Selling a DevOps environment is all about understanding what is relevant to management. Is it moving higher quality, moving faster? Is it about developers more accountable for their code? All these come about by way of a DevOps environment.

DevOps is all about understanding what is important to organization management. It is great for developers.