Why DevOps Is More Popular Than Ever
The lack of skilled IT workers is hurting the deployment of emerging technology, according to a new survey from Gartner. In areas from cloud to cybersecurity, this crisis is expected to last for years to come.
DevOps, the compound acronym for "development" and "operations" began around 2010 and increased steadily thereafter. But it wasn't until early 2019 that interest in DevOps sharply increased.
Granted, Google Trends is a crude, closed-source data source. And interest in DevOps as measured by Google is certainly not a straightforward representation of things such as the economic importance of DevOps or the influence of DevOps within programming communities specifically (as compared to within Google's user base as a whole).
Nevertheless, DevOps' increasing popularity and adoption by companies translates into growing job opportunities.
Why is DevOps Popular
It was surprising to see such a large and sudden spike in interest in DevOps starting early this year. There is no singular event that explains the trend. But there are several longer-term factors that, when added together, probably have been responsible for ushering in a world where more people than ever are talking about DevOps.
IT Education
One is the fact that DevOps finally seems to have made its way into mainstream computer science and IT education.
What this means is the university is now graduating students who are already familiar with DevOps as they enter the workplace. They are spreading the gospel of DevOps to organizations that have not already heard it, and they are reinforcing it where it is already present.
Market Maturity
Another factor at play, is the market for DevOps tools has matured and consolidated. Even just five years ago, most companies talking seriously about DevOps were startups. Now, many of those startups have become hugely successful independent companies (such as Slack) or have been acquired (such as Wercker or Electric Cloud) by larger organizations.
To be sure, plenty of other DevOps startups have failed or stalled. But the fact that others have succeeded spectacularly has done much to drive continued interest in DevOps.
Sophisticated DevOps Tools
Last but not least, the tooling for DevOps has matured along with the market. Circa 2010, when the conversation about DevOps was getting started, it was much easier to talk about de-siloing your IT organization than it was to break down the silos in practice.
At the time, DevOps-friendly collaboration tools had not yet gone mainstream. Release automation suites were also mostly limited to PaaS-style offerings whose features amounted primarily to automating deployments.
They lacked the end-to-end integration, testing, building and management features of modern DevOps release tools. And many of the more advanced DevOps release platforms were built by startups, which made adopting them somewhat risky (because you could end up with a platform of a vendor that went out of business suddenly).
Today, in contrast, there is a litany of mature, feature-rich CI/CD tools to choose from—not to mention communication and collaboration solutions such as Slack and GitHub. It's very easy to build a DevOps toolset, and you no longer have to rely on new, market-untested solutions to do so. This fact, too, has helped make DevOps more popular than ever.
How will the popularity of DevOps change from here? It will probably continue to rise as the market and DevOps tooling mature even more, and as DevOps continues to make its way into mainstream educational programs.
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