If you think DevOps is BS, you may be a victim of bandwagon marketing

I’ve been coming across more DevOps naysayers and sceptics recently. Whether online or face-to-face, I keep hearing people saying that DevOps is just the latest example of marketing BS or management consulting puff. Some seem to be putting DevOps into the same category as cloud, big data, and those other ambiguous terms that have no precise meaning, so can be spun however you want to help you sell stuff. The reality (and irony) is that DevOps started out quite a few years ago as a grass roots movement driven by practitioners working at the sharp-end of IT delivery. It’s about as far from a marketing invention as you could possibly get. Furthermore, while there is a strong cultural aspect to it (which can admittedly create the impression of wooliness), there are also a lot of hard core process and tooling elements involved. If you aren’t familiar with that side of things, take a look at our research report entitled Assembling the DevOps Jigsaw. Page 8 in particular lays out some of the specific enablers and how they fit together. Our paper, Orchestrating the DevOps Tool Chain, then goes into a lot more detail if you want to take it further. In the meantime, don’t let the marketing bandwagon that is clearly starting to roll colour your views in this area. We are seeing the usual ‘me too’ claims, many of which don’t stand up to even a cursory cross examination, but there’s also a lot of hard core technology and best practice to really sink your teeth into. And if anyone tells you DevOps doesn’t scale, just don’t believe them. In our research we have spoken with organisations applying DevOps and Continuous Delivery across pipelines of tens, even hundreds of application streams. The bottom is line is that DevOps is very real, and will ultimately become the norm for IT delivery. Related Material Assembling the DevOps Jigsaw Do you have all the right pieces in place? Orchestrating the DevOps Tool Chain Continuous delivery for the Enterprise Strategic DevOps Adoption Where are you on your continuous delivery journey? Build a DevOps culture Webcast with Dale Vile