Mandi Walls, Senior Technical Evangelist for Opscode, also known as the DevOps Diva, discussed DevOps trends, along with automation, orchestration, and other key aspects of the marketplace with theCUBE host John Furrier, live at the recently concluded O’Reilly Velocity conference in Santa Clara.

DevOps has been validated, Walls said, even “in the enterprise where they are interested in improving their relationship and performance for the customers.” The biggest frustration involving DevOps is that a lot of people still consider it “a replacement for operations. The whole idea was that successful products and services you give the customers are fully integrated,” walls explained, which is achieved through collaboration across teams. People are still “hearing just the ops part.” Other than development and operations, DevOps also includes security, networking, and many other aspects.

Parts of the marketplace are still emerging, she explained, as people still have their own definition of provisioning, their own idea of what orchestration they need.

• Automation trends: still need work

Commenting on automation trends, Walls said that “system automation has been around for a long time, but hasn’t done its best to keep up with changes, system complexity and evolution.” There are good paradigms, but there is still work to be done. “Orchestration is still a horizon to be conquered,” she added. “Part of the success of the next generation of orchestration pieces will partially be education and resetting expectations,” as well as developing that next breed of technology.

“Everyone is paying attention to performance for virtualization and how that has continued to evolved,” Walls said. As the industry is still at a point where not everything can be virtualized, companies are “trying to have the right technologies to fit the needs and grow them to enhance customer experiences.”

Future Chef plans include adding features which will be launched later in the year, as Opscode continues to “help our customers meet internal needs for configuration management.” The company is also working on providing new documentation for Chef.

See Walls’ entire segment below.