DevOps communication and alerting provider xMatters, Inc. put together an infographic why businesses need to plan out DevOps toolchain integrations because a properly built DevOps plan should work like a well-oiled machine. As with any well-oiled machine the production, upgrading and maintenance is part of a chain of activities (or tools) used by a team or multiple teams and in DevOps this is represented by a lifecycle that passes through various linked services and tools, thus a DevOps toolchain.

In 2015, a Gartner analysis put DevOps as expanding from a niche to a mainstream philosophy in 2016. The total DevOps tool market in 2015 reached $2.3 billion USD, up 21.1 percent from $1.9 billion in 2014. Fitting in with this prediction, 2016 has seen a rise in tools and expectations and the xMatters infographic elaborates the growing need to use that market of tools for business interests to build a DevOps lifecycle.

“In response to the rapid change in business today, DevOps can help organizations that are pushing to implement a bimodal strategy to support their digitalization efforts,” said Laurie Wurster, research director at Gartner. “Digital business is essentially software, which means that organizations that expect to thrive in a digital environment must have an improved competence in software delivery.”

The thesis of the infographic draws on VMware, Inc.’s blog article “3 Common Mistakes when Breaking Organizational Silos for Cloud and DevOps,” where VMware spoke to three problems: focusing too much on tools rather than communication, businesses overlooking traditional skills instead of transforming them and finally focusing on problems rather than solutions.

According to a 2014 DevOps.com article about breaking silos, the modern approach to DevOps is about mixing specialization while silos evolved out of a need to compartmentalize that specialization. “Many IT teams operate in their ‘own worlds’ with tailor-made but disconnected tools and information resources.  Silos have evolved because they permit the specialization required to deal with the immense…” and “…coordinating work and sharing information across these silos of teams often equates to lots of meetings, conference calls, and email threads.”

The concept that DevOps runs on communication and team solutions is a long running paradigm and automation is only one step in easing hand offs between different teams and systems. Collaboration, development, build, deploy, monitoring and management may all be run by separate teams or exist as a mixture of teams. In the end each of these parts of the lifecycle must participate in the labor of the previous segment and anticipate the needs of the next.

Across the industry, many companies are working on tools that fit elegantly into xMatters’s infographic. Such as VictorOps Inc. providing incident automation to provide high-resolution data to teams by picking the right people for the right job. Service company MoogSoft Inc. uses social media solutions to create “situation rooms” for dealing with incidents and bringing together separate teams to deal with delivery or problems. Following the same pattern, SaaS log-analytics company Logentries, Inc. DevOps product annotates live and historical data to provide greater visibility into what happened and who is involved.

Stitching all of this together, Informatica CEO Anil Chakravarthy said recently at Informatica World 2016 that this is all part of the Age of Data 3.0, where IT teams must work together to keep business applications running all the while customers are using them. He likened the process to mechanics working on fixing an airplane engine while the aircraft was still in flight—or, to stretch the metaphor, adding features such as increased engine performance or finer controls while in flight.

DevOps teams are already doing this, according to a survey by New Relic, Inc. in 2015, 11 percent of companies surveyed released multiple times a day, 19 percent multiple times per week.

The DevOps systemic approach to communication and automation

The xMatters infographic cites the Puppet Labs (Puppet, Inc.) 2015 State of DevOps report to give a glowing recommendation to a DevOps systemic approach. High-performing IT organizations who adopt DevOps best practices by automating and synchronizing communications see 60 percent fewer failures and recover from failures 168 times faster than lower-performing peers; these same organizations deploy 30 times more frequently and with 200 times shorter lead times.

In order to do this, as mentioned above, a DevOps toolchain must automate hand-offs between different parts of the lifecycle and “orchestrate communication with data, systems and processes.” In the industry this means providing project- and incident-related information to every level of management and operations from executives, developers, IT operations and infrastructure engineering.

The practices and paradigm behind the original proposition of DevOps provides a great deal of benefits, listed above, however the conclusion of the infographic cites a Gartner DevOps report from 2015, which states that by 2018 at least 50 percent of organizations using traditional DevOps principles will not be delivering those benefits.

To avoid this, the modern DevOps enterprise must evolve to include automation that augments communication between teams and to do that xMatters posits that a systemic view of the entire development and operations lifecycle is require. Many tools listed above continue to proliferate focusing on different parts of the lifecycle, but their interaction and the system of their interaction is the key to the future of DevOps.

Featured image credit: xMatters, Inc. Infographic related to DevOps toolsets.