Dev and ops, a marriage made in heaven?

It may not have been love on the face of it, now now IT development and operations teams are going beyond just cozying up and are, actually, marrying their efforts . Open source has played a key role, and has been conspiring with the trends towards cloud computing and agile development to bring these cute kids at the same time.

I was talking to Jay "Cupid" Lyman who's leading the 451 group effort to understand the reasons behind phenomenon. He cites cloud computing and agile development as driving the need and open source as the catalyst for devops.

Cloud computing is all about getting applications quickly deployed and flexibly. Meanwhile with the current maturity of the innovation, only applications designed with Cloud in mind can fully leverage the elasticity and flexibility. SaaS is a special case which moreover blurs the devops line. The service is the product. SLAs are a feature and one that requires proper software and proper operation of the software to deliver on its promise.

In his report on devops, Lyman talks about open source as a catalyst for this change and as a facilitator. Nevertheless when I spoke with Jay, he as a matter of fact emphasized the way in which open source has paved the cultural path to devops. This new model requires transparency, communication and collaboration, and organizations that have adopted open source are simply inclined that way. The advent of scripting style languages has provided a common ground for developers and Linux system administrators. He as well talks about the way that open source has emerged as a grass roots effort, subtly infiltrating organizations so then ahead of management catching up. Similarly, many developers and operations staff are intrinsically crossing to the other side earlier adopting the name of devops.

Phil Odence Vice President of Business Development for Black Duck Software, makers of enterprise app development tools that address management, compliance and security challenges associated with open source. In that role Phil is responsible for expanding Black Duck's reach, image and product breadth by developing partnerships in the multi-source development ecosystem. He came to Black Duck from Empirix a leader in carrier VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), contact center and Web application testing and monitoring. He served there as Vice President of Business Development successfully developing the firm's alliance program, creating strategic partnerships, starting up new businesses and supporting M&A activities. Prior to Empirix, Phil was a partner at High Performance Systems, a computer simulation modeling firm where he was responsible for consulting and partnerships with leading management consultancies, including McKinsey and A.T. Kearney.

Black Duck counts a long list of then-known innovation companies as partners. These include IBM, Novell, Red Hat, HP, Intel and Microsoft.