DevOps is a methodology that brings together development and operations to streamline and automate the software development lifecycle. It focuses on improving collaboration, enhancing efficiency, and delivering high-quality software at a faster pace. DevOps practices are applicable across a wide range of industries and business sectors, where they help organizations automate and optimize the processes of software development, deployment, and monitoring.

In this post, we’ll explore where DevOps is used, its major applications in different industries, and how it’s transforming the way organizations deliver software and services.

1. DevOps in Software Development

Major Features:

• Faster Software Delivery:
  • DevOps is most commonly used in software development environments. It automates and integrates software deployment processes, which accelerates the overall development cycle and ensures faster delivery of features, updates, and bug fixes.
• Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD):
  • DevOps leverages CI/CD pipelines to automate the testing, building, and deployment of software. This ensures that developers can integrate code frequently, which leads to faster bug fixes and reduced errors in production.
• Collaboration Between Development and Operations:
  • DevOps practices break down silos between development and operations teams, fostering better communication, shared responsibilities, and smoother collaboration across the software development lifecycle.
• Tools:
  • Common tools used in DevOps for software development include Jenkins, GitLab, Docker, and Kubernetes, which automate various parts of the software development, testing, and deployment pipeline.

2. DevOps in IT Operations

Major Features:

• Infrastructure Automation:
  • DevOps is widely used in IT operations for automating infrastructure management and provisioning. By using tools like Terraform, Ansible, and CloudFormation, DevOps automates the configuration and management of IT infrastructure.
• Scalability and Flexibility:
  • DevOps ensures that infrastructure can scale seamlessly to handle changes in workload. With the help of cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) and orchestration tools like Kubernetes, DevOps enables the rapid scaling of IT resources based on demand.
• Continuous Monitoring:
  • DevOps practices involve continuous monitoring of both infrastructure and applications to ensure performance, uptime, and stability. Tools such as Prometheus, Datadog, and Grafana allow real-time tracking of system health and alert teams to potential issues before they escalate.
• Efficiency and Cost Savings:
  • Automating IT operations through DevOps results in more efficient use of resources, reduced operational costs, and faster responses to system failures or issues.

3. DevOps in Cloud Computing

Major Features:

• Cloud-Native Applications:
  • DevOps is integral to the development and management of cloud-native applications, where containerization and microservices architecture are often used. With DevOps, organizations can automate cloud infrastructure management and improve the deployment of cloud-based services.
• Continuous Deployment in the Cloud:
  • DevOps enables continuous deployment in cloud environments, allowing businesses to release new features or updates seamlessly without downtime. Cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure support DevOps practices through native services and tools.
• Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Environments:
  • DevOps allows organizations to manage multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments more efficiently, facilitating better integration and orchestration across different cloud platforms and on-premises infrastructure.
• Efficiency and Agility:
  • Cloud adoption paired with DevOps practices increases the efficiency of resource usage and agility, enabling faster and more frequent application releases in the cloud.

4. DevOps in the Finance Industry

Major Features:

• Regulatory Compliance and Security:
  • DevOps is increasingly being used in the finance industry to streamline processes and ensure compliance with regulatory frameworks such as PCI-DSS, SOX, and GDPR. DevSecOps, a security-focused extension of DevOps, integrates security into the development and deployment pipeline.
• Automation in Financial Software:
  • In financial institutions, DevOps automates the deployment of banking applications, payment systems, and financial services platforms. This helps financial organizations provide faster updates and improve the security of their systems.
• Real-Time Transaction Processing:
  • With DevOps, financial institutions can improve their real-time transaction processing, ensuring that systems remain operational during high transaction volumes and minimizing downtime.
• Tools:
  • Financial institutions use DevOps tools like Jenkins, Docker, and Chef to automate the software lifecycle and enhance operational efficiency.

5. DevOps in E-Commerce and Retail

Major Features:

• Rapid Deployment of New Features:
  • DevOps is heavily used in the e-commerce and retail industries, where frequent updates to websites, mobile apps, and inventory management systems are necessary. By adopting DevOps practices, e-commerce businesses can quickly deploy new features such as promotions, personalized offers, and payment options.
• Improved Customer Experience:
  • Continuous deployment of features and rapid response to system issues through real-time monitoring improves the customer experience, ensuring that online platforms are fast, reliable, and easy to use.
• Scalable Infrastructure for Traffic Peaks:
  • DevOps ensures that e-commerce platforms can scale infrastructure to meet peak traffic periods, such as during holiday sales or product launches, using tools like Kubernetes for orchestration and AWS Auto Scaling for dynamic resource management.
• Automation and Continuous Testing:
  • By integrating automated testing into the CI/CD pipeline, e-commerce platforms can ensure that updates don’t break functionality, providing more reliable service for customers.

6. DevOps in Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals

Major Features:

• Compliance and Security:
  • In the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, where patient data privacy is critical, DevOps practices help ensure that software development and deployment adhere to regulatory compliance, including HIPAA and FDA regulations. DevSecOps practices ensure that security is integrated throughout the DevOps pipeline.
• Efficient Data Management:
  • DevOps helps in managing and processing large datasets efficiently in healthcare applications, particularly when handling patient records, medical imaging, and clinical data for research purposes. It enables automated data pipelines for processing and analysis.
• Improved Time-to-Market:
  • DevOps practices improve time-to-market for new medical software applications, clinical tools, and pharmaceutical platforms by automating deployments and accelerating the development cycle.
• Collaboration and Integration:
  • DevOps fosters better collaboration between IT teams, developers, and regulatory bodies, improving the speed and quality of software delivery while ensuring compliance and security.

The Versatility of DevOps

DevOps is a versatile methodology used across various industries and applications. From software development and IT operations to cloud computing, finance, e-commerce, and healthcare, DevOps practices enhance efficiency, scalability, security, and collaboration. By automating workflows, fostering cross-functional collaboration, and ensuring continuous integration and delivery, DevOps helps organizations deliver high-quality software and services faster.

As more organizations continue to embrace DevOps, its use cases expand beyond traditional software development to cloud environments, enterprise IT, and even highly regulated industries. The ability of DevOps to increase productivity, improve collaboration, and automate manual tasks makes it a vital methodology for modern businesses.

Hi everyone, welcome to my course study on Jira software. In this course, you will learn everything about Jira software and I will explain to you each and everything about Jira software from a user perspective and from an admin perspective as well. So, before going forward, I would like to tell you this article is for people who are brand new to Jira. Jira is a very comprehensive tool with a lot of customizable capabilities and I would like to share one secret about how personally we use Jira, we use Jira to track our day-to-day activities and we love to use it to track our activities. For this article, I have certain agenda.

What is JIRA?

So, we move forward to know more about what is Jira? So, Jira is project management, issue-tracking, and bug-tracking tool. For agile software and business teams. It is made by a company and the company name is Atlassian. It is an Australian company but now they have different offices in many countries. Actually, the name “JIRA” is inherited from the Japanese word “Go Jira” which means “Godzilla”.   

Why should we use JIRA?

There are lots of software available in the market which are very similar to Jira then why should we use Jira? Why do the people in most of the organizations prefer to go with a Jira? So, the reason is it has everything that you need to manage projects and teams and is fully customizable to your needs, you can customize your workflow, add your custom issues types, you can add your fields, and design your issue operations screen as per your team requirements and countless adds-on to further enhance the functionality. Let me tell you about the marketplace of Jira where you can find various apps which are used to enhance the functionality of Jira. Let me tell you about the official website of Atlassian www.atlassian.com and you will click on the product tab, you will see on the right-hand side, you will have an option of the marketplace so, you will click on that and you will find multiple apps already available. You can filter as per the Atlassian products, if you will click on Jira then you will see lots of apps are available like tempo timesheet, automation for Jira, and many more so you can use any app according to your requirements so let’s move forward for another one. Features Jira has lots of features that make your life easier.    

What are the JIRA products?

The other one is what are the Jira products? Many peoples are not aware of like Jira is a family of products, built to help all types of teams track their work there are four products built on Jira platforms:

• Jira core
• Jira software
• Jira service Desk
• Jira Ops

I will tell you one by one what is the meaning and what are the features for these products so, let’s start with the first one Jira core, what is Jira core? It allows you to track issues using a customizable workflow which basically determines how issues can flow from start to completion and what are the other steps along with. This basic functionality that would you get with Jira core is the base bare minimum Jira tool that you can use for simple business-related products and task management. Let’s move forward to the next one and which is Jira software with Jira software which you will be using in this complete course. You have extra agile functionality where you can track software projects with agile methodology. In other words, Jira software includes both Jira core plus agile methodology. Now, what is the Jira service desk? It is a service desk that is used for support projects using the Jira service desk you can give a better experience to your customers they can easily ask for help and your agents can respond to them in a better way. The other one is Jira Ops, which is an incident management tool. It is used to centralize alerts and notify the right people at the right time so, these are the four products that come under the Jira platforms.  

Which agile methodology is used in JIRA?

Most of the people who start to learn Jira, who use to learn Jira has this question in their mind which agile methodology is used in Jira? So, I will tell you Jira software is an agile project management tool that supports any agile methodology, be it Scrum, Kanban, or your own unique flavor. You can use Scrum, Kanban, mixed methodologies, and agile scale up to your requirement but this software fit your framework scrum, Kanban, or your unique another one so, in this course you will focus on scrum and a little bit about Kanban as well because I saw most of the organization uses scrum, Kanban as well. I wish that you will get more core fundamentals about Jira methodology and it will more guide you in the future points of view.

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That collaboration can take many forms, and for the uninitiated, approaches such as DevOps or agile development can be hard to grasp at a high level — and they may seem like the same thing.

But while they may do similar things, agile and DevOps have some notable differences, and their greatest power may emerge when they come together in one cultural piece.

What Is Agile Development?
First codified during a 2001 meeting at a ski resort in Utah, agile development is an approach built around a philosophy that emphasizes collaborative responses and quick change. The Agile Manifesto that came out of that meeting broke down the importance of a customer-driven approach to development that favors the individual over process.

Since that point, agile development has exploded into a full-on discipline that’s widely used throughout the business world. According to one 2019 study, 97 percent of organizations use agile in some way, shape or form, but there is room for further uptake, as 48 percent of respondents say that less than half of their teams are agile.

While there were elements that predated the formalizing of a modern development processes, says Tara Hernandez, a senior engineering manager at Google, many of the concepts of DevOps later evolved through agile development’s encouragement of faster development cycles and close collaboration.

“As far as starting to formalize the discussion, the Agile Manifesto talked a lot about the 12 principles, earlier time-to-market and more interaction with customers,” she says, encapsulating the approach as: “What are the things that make your organization engage?”

The Key Principles of the Agile Manifesto
The Agile Manifesto’s 12 principles, as described by the Agile Alliance, include:

Customer satisfaction: The highest priority of an agile development approach is to satisfy customers through continuous delivery of software.
Frequent release cycles: Agile development relies on release cycles of a few weeks to a few months.
Close collaboration: Business staff should work closely with developers on the project.
Sustainable development: The approach should allow for a constant pace that can continue indefinitely.
There are different types of agile development — most notably, scrum, a sprint-driven approach that is most common among agile proponents — but ultimately, the goals of agile development focus on continuous software development that considers the needs of the consumer and can adapt to changes as they happen.

What Is DevOps?
Often described in the same breath as agile development, DevOps is a similar method that leans on improving processes so things get done faster.

DevOps, which was formalized around 2009 but whose roots date back years earlier, refers to a merger between development and IT operations that applies continuous integration methodologies to traditional infrastructure development.

While not limited to settings such as the cloud and the server room, DevOps is often associated with those technologies. A good example of this in action is DevSecOps, which extends the approach specifically to security needs so that response time is minimized and vulnerabilities are quickly detected.

How Does Agile Development Differ from DevOps?
DevOps, in many ways, is a maturation of the agile development approach, as both represent a reaction to the separated-out waterfall style of development. One term used in reference to both disciplines is the idea of “shifting left,” in which practices associated with later parts of a waterfall process are considered much earlier in an agile or DevOps process.

But in many ways, DevOps moves faster and has a different target audience. As a blog post from the tech education platform Guru99 notes, there are significant differences in scale, audience and the way that teams are structured. Agile development tends to enable problem-solving within smaller teams, while DevOps by nature tends to work across departments to help solve larger goals quickly.

Basically, DevOps “brings two large siloed teams together to allow for quicker software releases while Agile is focused on getting smaller teams to collaborate with each other so it can react quickly to the ever-changing consumer needs,” wrote Kaya Ismail in a 2018 comparison of the technologies for CMS Wire.

The role of interaction also differs in each approach: For example, DevOps leans heavily on process automation using tools such as Infrastructure as Code, while agile focuses on a collaborative approach to problem-solving.

How Can Agile and DevOps Be Used Together?
Despite differences between the two methodologies, a general understanding of the role of each can help pinpoint compatibility between the processes. With individual teams taking an agile development approach within a broader DevOps culture, the processes can be combined in a way that’s very complementary.

You do not need to choose between DevOps or agile — instead, you can make use of both methodologies. Agile is strong on methods to organize work, such as through Scrum or Kanban, and DevOps drives a broader culture of getting software delivered faster and more reliably.

In many ways, there is a lot of compatibility in how agile development and DevOps work that makes them very complementary. Hernandez notes that the evolution of DevOps formalized many of the ideas of agile, and as a result, both work at a cultural level, rather than as purely technical approaches.

“The key thing is, what do you need to do, both from a cultural standpoint and a technology standpoint, to enable fast, high-quality velocity of delivery? And it has to be cultural, because technology all by itself — no matter what some vendors will tell you — never solves these types of problems,” she says.

How Can Organizations Implement an Agile Approach to DevOps?
Ultimately, agile and DevOps can work well together, but there must be an understanding of the relationship between speed and quality, Hernandez says, noting that this may be different for every organization.

“Really understand what problem you are trying to solve, then tailor your efforts to that problem,” she says. “Otherwise, you’re likely not going to get what you want.”

Working with a strong partner, such as CDW Amplified™ Services, can help get you there. Only your organization will know what the perfect balance is between your agile teams and a DevOps-friendly culture, but having a helping hand to do the cultural work can maximize your technical capabilities.

HERNDON, Va.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–ePlus inc. (NASDAQ NGS: PLUS – news) today announced that it has developed a methodology to help Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers accelerate adoption of the new AWS Gateway Load Balancer (GWLB) service, which makes it easy to deploy, scale, and manage third-party virtual appliances. Recently launched, GWLB seeks to simplify the networking and security of virtual appliances within AWS deployments. By streamlining management, maximizing cost efficiencies, and increasing scalability, GWLB will help protect AWS customers against both known and unknown threats and provide access to powerful new functionality.

An AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, ePlus has been working with AWS and key Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to test the new functionality and create a methodology to speed adoption for customers. The ePlus offerings for GWLB include live demonstration capabilities, proof of concept engagements, and accelerated deployment packages.

“Networking and security are two of the most critical foundations of enterprise AWS deployments, which can also be the most complicated aspects to design, implement, and manage,” said Justin Mescher, vice president of cloud and data center strategy for ePlus. “Customers can now leverage the appliance of their choice in AWS, and GWLB dynamically manages the scale and availability. This dynamic scaling will significantly reduce cost and complexity for our customers.”

Statements in this press release that are not historical facts may be deemed to be “forward-looking statements.” Actual and anticipated future results may vary materially due to certain risks and uncertainties, including, without limitation, risks related to COVID-19, including but not limited to its possible effects on the availability of and demand for our products and services, our ability to efficiently and flexibly manage our business amid uncertainties related to COVID-19, and its impact on the economy, possible adverse effects resulting from financial market disruption and fluctuations in foreign currency rates, and general slowdown of the U.S. economy such as our current and potential customers delaying or reducing technology purchases or put downward pressure on prices, increasing credit risk associated with our customers and vendors, reduction of vendor incentive programs, and restrictions on our access to capital necessary to fund our operations; our ability to consummate and integrate acquisitions; the possibility of goodwill impairment charges in the future; significant adverse changes in, reductions in, or losses of relationships with major customers or vendors; the demand for and acceptance of, our products and services; our ability to adapt our services to meet changes in market developments; our ability to implement comprehensive plans to achieve customer account coverage for the integration of sales forces, cost containment, asset rationalization, systems integration and other key strategies; our ability to reserve adequately for credit losses; our ability to secure our electronic and other confidential information or that of our customers or partners; future growth rates in our core businesses; our ability to protect our intellectual property; the impact of competition in our markets; the possibility of defects in our products or catalog content data; our ability to adapt to changes in the IT industry and/or rapid change in product standards; our ability to realize our investment in leased equipment; our ability to hire and retain sufficient qualified personnel; and other risks or uncertainties detailed in our reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. All information set forth in this press release is current as of the date of this release and ePlus undertakes no duty or obligation to update this information.

This shift raises an important question: as DevOps practices such as agile methodology, continuous deployment, and iterative optimization become standard in modern engineering teams, should automation follow the same principles? The answer is yes—and this article explores how to apply a DevOps mindset to your automation strategy.

The Problem with “Set and Forget” Automation

Legacy automation was built for a more stable world: physical servers with predictable workloads, slow-moving infrastructure, and infrequent change cycles. You wrote a script, ran it on a schedule, and moved on. That model is increasingly incompatible with modern cloud-native environments where infrastructure is ephemeral, workloads are dynamic, and business requirements change rapidly.

The risk of static automation is compounded by scale. When a machine executes a flawed or outdated policy, it does so consistently and at speed—propagating mistakes across hundreds or thousands of resources before anyone notices. This is precisely why automation must be treated as a living system, subject to the same continuous improvement cycles that DevOps applies to software delivery.

The New Expectations of IT Automation

Applying a DevOps mindset to automation starts with asking the right questions before and after you automate anything. The following four questions provide a practical framework for building an iterative, continuously optimized automation practice.

1. Is This a Good Process Worth Automating?

This may seem like an obvious starting point, but it is frequently skipped. Processes and policies are often automated once and then forgotten—even as the underlying infrastructure, application architecture, or business goals change significantly. A continuous optimization approach forces teams to periodically revisit existing automation and ask whether each policy still serves its intended purpose.

Not every process is a good candidate for automation. Some workflows are sensitive enough that automating them without sufficient safeguards threatens data integrity or compliance. Others are high-level decisions that depend on contextual judgment that scripts cannot replicate. A good automation engineer identifies which tasks genuinely benefit from automation and which require human oversight, and they revisit that assessment regularly.

2. How Often Does This Process Occur?

Frequency matters both for justifying the investment in automation and for keeping automation schedules accurate. Tasks such as patching, load balancing, or workload orchestration may run on a fixed time-series schedule or be triggered on demand. As infrastructure evolves—particularly as teams adopt serverless and cloud-native patterns where workloads are short-lived and highly variable—those schedules must evolve too.

An automation schedule that made sense for a fleet of long-running virtual machines may be entirely wrong for a containerized microservices environment. Continuously adapting the schedule to match actual workload patterns and customer demand is a core part of keeping automation effective.

3. How Long Does the Process Take?

Automation must be tested for both efficiency and correctness against the actual duration and frequency of the task it replaces. Some legacy system updates take hours; some orchestration tasks are near-continuous. Automation that is slower than the manual process—or that introduces latency into a time-sensitive pipeline—creates new problems rather than solving old ones.

Treat automation performance as a measurable metric. Establish baselines for how long manual execution takes, then measure automated execution against those baselines regularly. Regressions in execution time are a signal that the automation needs to be revisited.

4. Is There an Irreplaceable Human Element?

Automation can handle well-defined, repeatable tasks with reliable inputs—but it struggles with ambiguity, novel situations, and tasks that require contextual judgment. Activities such as deriving insights from anomalous data, designing new workflows, program management decisions, or architectural trade-offs still benefit significantly from human involvement.

This is where AIOps—the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning to IT operations—becomes relevant. AIOps can extend automation into more complex domains by giving systems the ability to learn from historical patterns and make probabilistic decisions. However, for most organizations today, AIOps is still an emerging capability. Until it is mature and accessible, teams should explicitly map out the points in any automated workflow where human review and decision-making must occur, and build those checkpoints into the process deliberately.

Applying DevOps Principles to Automation

The parallels between DevOps and a mature automation practice are direct:

• Iterate frequently. Just as DevOps favors small, frequent releases over large infrequent ones, automation policies should be updated in small increments and tested in staging or limited-blast-radius environments before wide deployment.
• Measure everything. DevOps relies on observability to understand system behavior. Automation should emit metrics and logs—execution time, success and failure rates, number of resources affected—so that its performance can be monitored and regressed against.
• Fail fast and recover. Good automation includes error handling, rollback mechanisms, and alerting. When a policy fails, the failure should be surfaced quickly and the impact contained.
• Treat automation as code. Store automation scripts, runbooks, and policies in version control. Apply code review practices. This makes changes auditable and reversible.
• Collaborate across teams. Automation that spans development, security, and operations benefits from cross-functional input—the same way DevOps breaks down silos between dev and ops teams.

Automation as a Strategic Tool, Not an End Goal

Automation is one of the most impactful capabilities available to modern IT operations teams. It reduces the burden of repetitive manual work, accelerates incident response, and frees engineers to focus on higher-value problems. But automation is a means to an end, not the destination itself.

Think of automation as a system that turns operational data into action. The quality of that action depends entirely on the quality of the policies driving it—and those policies must be maintained, measured, and improved continuously. As AI and machine learning capabilities mature and become more accessible, they will extend what automation can do. Until then, it falls to IT professionals to apply the same discipline to automation that DevOps has brought to software delivery: iterate, measure, improve, and never stop asking whether the current approach is the right one.

This article is based on analysis originally published on devops.com, drawing on findings from the Capgemini enterprise automation survey.

The wide success of agile as a way to improve transparency and delivery is a great example of a better way of working that seemed to be making a real and positive change to organizations that were correctly embracing it. Similarly, the adoption of cloud services as a place to build new, highly scalable solutions was a “no brainer” for organizations looking at what other successful companies were doing.

However, not all agile adoption was successful and not all cloud migrations went off without a hitch. Trying to get your legacy, waterfall based organization to be agile overnight was never going to be an easy ride, in much the same way as migrating in-house legacy systems onto a cloud provider comes with a number of practical challenges.

With all these popular trends, it pays to research and assess your own readiness to adopt and adapt to the change that is being considered. DevOps is no different.

While I’m personally an advocate of the many benefits that DevOps can provide to an organization, there are also scenarios where I think its adoption is likely to be too challenging to offer a practical solution in the short term.

Four Examples of Challenging Situations

These four examples highlight areas that would make the implementation of DevOps challenging, often for very understandable reasons. These challenges do not mean that DevOps should be dismissed out of hand. Rather, they help set an expectation of the difficulties that may arise and provide some thinking for how issues might be considered to achieve the best outcomes.

Command and Control Organizations

Looking at agile as a starting point, the value of trusting your teams to do their best, goes a long way to achieving the desired outcomes. That doesn’t mean trust in the sense of blind faith, but rather in building trust based off of successful deliveries.

As the culture of DevOps is strongly aligned to the values of agile delivery, an organization should have a healthy level of trust in the people who develop and operate their systems if they expect DevOps to be successfully adopted.

Ideally, you want your business to benefit from the “group thinking” that comes from clever technical people working together to improve delivery—through automation, baking in quality control and improving time to deliver. It is difficult to achieve this in a traditional top-down environment where a single person (or small group) is responsible for telling everyone else what to do.

If this describes your organization, then expect to have some wider challenges and costs in terms of widening the decision making to get the best benefits of DevOps.

Thinking that Tools = DevOps

There is no shortage of amazing innovation in the tooling to support DevOps at the moment. From the ways in which code can be deployed, to the ways in which environments can be built and managed, there are dozens of really outstanding technologies to help digital engineers.

The key here is that those tools facilitate the implementation of a good DevOps delivery. More important than any tools is a process that starts with the people doing the job. It may be that the tools themselves are a key reason why you were first alerted to DevOps, however, tooling by itself will not give you a DevOps culture.

Instead, start with a problem that needs to be solved or a process that can be improved upon. Look at the engineers in the team who are asking these questions and those who are engaging in answering them. Next, try carving out some time for them to research and test their lines of enquiries and see where this goes.

It may be that no new tools are required. It can also be that you find something perfect that doesn’t have the hype or marketing budget that other vendors are pushing behind their tools. Promoting collaboration, engagement and feedback loops creates a much better foundation to build your DevOps culture around.

Bureaucratic Organizations

As mentioned earlier, DevOps works well in work environments that promote and support healthy trust and empowerment as part of their broader culture. In highly regulated or controlled environments, regardless of the trust, the adoption of DevOps may be difficult and less beneficial where it doesn’t also come with empowerment.

If the needs of the wider business put in controls that hinder, or actively limit, the ability for the IT function to be as effective as it can be, many of the speed related benefits of DevOps will be reduced. In turn, the benefits of adopting DevOps are likely to feel marginal.

There may be very good reasons for having such controls, checks and balances in place, especially in highly regulated industries or those where security is a key focus in their offering. In these scenarios you may want a separation of interest between environments to fire gap different teams and functions.

There may still be ways that DevOps thinking and the related tools can help, but the overall benefits will again be diminished.

Disconnected Delivery Teams

The very name “DevOps,” is a mix of development and operations, and promotes a culture that recognizes the benefits in allowing for these capabilities to work together much more closely to the benefit of the wider IT delivery.

In situations where an organization has broken these into distinct units and has structured itself to continue working that way, DevOps is unlikely to deliver effectively.

This may be especially true for larger enterprise organizations, where specialist capability (or technical) teams have evolved around large, business critical systems. Areas where this can be observed include complex ecommerce package implementations, workflow heavy asset management systems and monolithic backend packages. Often the specialist way in which these systems need to be configured and customised mean that they are not good candidates for integrating within a broader DevOps culture.

Similarly, large organizations may have outsourced or partnered with a third party for part of a delivery or for the operations of their system(s). The nature of such contractual agreements means that it is difficult to promote cross-team collaboration without wrapping it in protective terms and controls.

Closing Thoughts

The fact that implementing DevOps in your organization may be difficult shouldn’t be a reason not to consider it. Instead of being put off by the challenges of implementing DevOps at scale across the whole IT function, consider where it can be effectively introduced. Over time, systems change, policies evolve and people move on.

Starting small means that even marginal improvements can make a big difference to the effectiveness of the IT delivery function and establishes DevOps as something to be prioritized when the organizational appetite (or need) for change improves.