INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Software for Business
DevOps early
adopters say Open
Source and PaaS
are key
With DevOps approaches being used to create and
run software across an increasingly broad spectrum
of organisations, we’re now at the point where we
can gain quantitative insights from early adopters
about DevOps adoption that go beyond a handful
of soft-referenced Web-scale anecdotes, writes
Gordon Haff, Cloud Strategist, Red Hat.
T
hese insights, garnered from an
IDC InfoBrief sponsored Red
Hat DevOps, Open Source and
Business Agility (June 2015) include open
source as a top priority enabler, a wide
range of benefits from using PaaS, and
significantly faster software release cycles.
82 percent of the 220 IT decision
makers surveyed identified open source
as a critical or significant enabler of
their DevOps strategy. Open source
use spanned a variety of technologies
including operating systems such as
Linux, cloud infrastructure, platform-asa-service, provisioning, and infrastructure
monitoring. Open source benefits for
both IT operations and developer
team productivity/agility were cited as
benefits of open source as were access to
innovation and ease of customisation.
At the same time, these early
adopters strongly (46%) preferred
78
INTELLIGENTCIO
…EARLY ADOPTERS
STRONGLY (46%)
PREFERRED TO USE
VENDOR-SUPPORTED
EDITIONS OF OPEN
SOURCE SOFTWARE.
INDEED, ONLY 12% SAID
THAT THEIR PREFERRED
STRATEGY WAS TO
DOWNLOAD SOFTWARE
FROM FREE OPEN SOURCE
COMMUNITY SITES
to use vendor-supported editions
of open source software. Indeed,
only 12% said that their preferred
strategy was to download software
from free open source community
sites and integrate on their own or
with help from service providers.
Many discussions of DevOps talk to the
cultural changes required to improve
collaboration and increase transparency.
However, this survey points to the
changes in tooling expected as well. 93
percent of the respondents believed that
new enabling technologies are required
for DevOps success with 85% planning
to deploy these technologies onto either
on-premise infrastructure (49%) or
dedicated infrastructure at a co-location,
hosting, or outsourcing site (36%).
Prominent among the new technologies
was Platform-as-a-Service, with 80%
expecting PaaS to have a critical role
in their DevOps initiatives. Among
the cited benefits of using PaaS were
improved developer and IT operations
collaboration (46%), more stable and
reliable development environments
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