UPDATED 14:45 EDT / DECEMBER 02 2013

NEWS

2013 DevOps retro round-up: Agile development meets cloud computing

Cloud computing has really made it’s mark on the industry. In addition to improving the agility influence on the communication and collaboration between developers and IT operations with the DevOps model cloud-technology has lowered costs, changed the enterprise, and given everyone a lot to think about.

Through the year 2013, cloud computing evolved over time into a must-have skill for DevOps teams as well as enhancing collaboration, increasing uptime and giving development teams maneuvering room in the mobile world; however, it hasn’t been without its challenges and cloud-computing itself is still being embraced and shaken out by the industry and the developers who support it.

Cloud computing improved DevOps collaboration

As enterprise rushes to innovate, IT organizations are looking to implement DevOps strategies, which help foster collaboration between the teams that create and test applications (Dev) with those that maintain them in production environments (Ops).

In addition to the relationship between the developers and the IT operationa, cloud computing has also fundamentally changed the way software is developed today. An increased focus on IaaS in 2013 is accompanied by a heightened awareness about critically of time spent on development, and decisions regarding IT infrastructure sourcing.

CA Technologies is developing the strategy of LISA, an innovative platform that creates virtual environments for automated testing and development of applications in the cloud. LISA is an end-to-end solution that provides automation for all types of testing: unit testing, functional, integration, regression, load and performance. The solution supports these DevOps strategies by optimizing the application development process.

Avaya, a global leader in business communications, unveiled a set of new software and cloud-based services designed for companies to make decision much faster. The services include Avaya Aura Collaboration Environment software platform that facilitates the integration of collaboration and communications capabilities into business applications.

Telerik is another major player in 2013, which is building up DevTools with the needs and interests of development teams. The company has some major releases and enhancements this year including Q3 release of its leading .NET development tools suite, TeamPluse extension of GitHub for business users, and enhancement of Icenuim cross mobile dev platform. The Q3 release of its leading .NET development tools suite includes integrated analytics to leverage important data such as application interactions, crash reports and feature usage, while improving the usability of their most important applications.

The other driver for 2013 is competition and the need for differentiation. During the recently concluded AWS re:Invent 2013 event, Amazon launched Amazon Workspaces, a VDI solution for managing desktops in the cloud. The AWS powered cloud VDI solution offers a choice of bundles providing different amounts of CPU, memory, and storage. The solution is first steps towards utility computing, where data and computing power can be automatically moved through an IT infrastructure, when needed. It maximizes development and testing and provides provision/re-provision configuration instances for developers quickly and easily.

DevOps is continue to play a crucial driving force for cloud-based application delivery, particularly through automation of operations processes throughout 2013. Amazon is capitalizing on this trend to reshape the vendor landscape and establish itself as the dominant player in enterprise IT. TheCUBE hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante observed that AWS to stay competitive in the race for developers’ hearts and minds and other players like IBM, VMware will have to match the simplicity and the agility of AWS.

Cloud technology continues to rapidly mature agile development

We have seen PaaS technology is entering into custom application development. The evolution of optimal DevOps business models and operating models may push widespread adoption into next year. PaaS and DevOps are helping IT to be the enabler of innovation by empowering their developers and business users take advantage of services needed for their functional needs. Vendors that use PaaS to deliver custom software products will enjoy a significant cost advantage.

Google App Engine have proven that application platforms based on Linux containers can scale. Google cloud storage platform enables developers to implement cloud app solutions, such as mobile apps, social apps, business process apps, and websites. The service has matured and its new features could encourage more developers use the service. A lot of the developers on Google Partners use Google Compute Engine for specialized purposes to build consumer and business applications using the new features and flexibility of Google Cloud.

In addition, Google has launched a new collection of tools and libraries called Google Cloud Endpoints, to encourage developers to create more mobile apps in Google cloud. Google also unveiled Cloud Playground environment where developers can focus on building interesting applications instead of worrying about managing infrastructure.

Opscode’s Chef has been making inroads into the configuration management frameworks. The company has developed an open source framework to automate the process of configuring and managing virtual servers, allowing users to quickly deploy their own servers. The solution automates most of the IT infrastructure to create a coded business with the agility and adaptability to win the race to market.

Microsoft is gradually and consistently developing its Windows Azure cloud platform, signaling to developers that Windows Azure cloud platform is an ideal platform. The software gaint has announced a set of new and enhanced tools for application development and testing on Windows Azure including enhancements to Windows Azure including Dev/Test in the Cloud, BizTalk Services, per-minute billing and no charge for stopped VMs, SSL support with Web Sites, and Active Directory integration. The company also announced Visual Studio Online, the cloud version of the popular Visual Studio IDE platform and new 2013 version of Visual Studio.

Software driven DevOps model

The growing popularity of the cloud indicates the birth of a new era of how applications will be developed and designed and the shift is happening on a software driven model. VMware’s virtualization technology is making inroads into such applications in the area of computing, networking, storage and several other verticals. When it comes to orchestration and service management, companies like VMware are moving towards the software defined data center and virtualization using OpenStack technology.

The software defined model has become the new hardware for developers, while hardware is becoming a resource that can be provisioned. CloudMunch is another player in 2013 taking advantage of OpenStack framework and community. The DevOps management platform provider introduced the world’s first Open DevOps platform for developers and IT operations for development and continuous integration with continuous deployment to OpenStack. It features customizable software delivery progression workflow for standard checks on deployment and testing and cloud scale DevOps engine for integration enterprise master-master and master-slave clusters.

Cloud computing is a rapidly expanding into multibillion-dollar business and revolutionizing virtually every business model. By using real-world configurations, testing features and loads on the production network using cloud, developers will be able to gain a better understanding when applications are designed and deployed in various environments. In this new application-centric environment, operations teams will need to collaborate with the developers who create these applications and we expect the trend to continue in 2014.


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