 Over the past five years, DevOps has transformed from a model for agile software development practices to the aspirational standard for functions across the IT spectrum. Previously, developers and IT Ops teams were distinct and siloed—developers built the application and IT Ops managed production environments—but now many in the industry have shifted to create a net-new liaison between the two, allowing applications to exist simultaneously in the worlds of development and production.
While everyone is focusing on the convergence and collaboration of the developer and the IT Ops person, however, the storyline is changing again. The focus is now shifting back to the developer (and his/her specific skill sets), as there’s an increased demand for a single team to manage the entire application life cycle. Now more than ever, the people who actually develop the systems are poised to take ownership of traditional IT operations functions, such as maintenance, performance and availability.
As IT continues to evolve, three trends point to the expanding and evolving role of the developer.
- The decoupling of infrastructure from services. With the rise of public and private clouds, more of the technology stack is becoming abstracted away from infrastructure, and often offloaded to a provider. This has created challenges for how developers manage and deliver applications in this new environment. In the past, IT operations was responsible for ensuring things such as availability and performance, but now, developers can build those capabilities into the applications themselves.
- The elimination of infrastructure setup. IT Ops roles have traditionally been the gatekeepers, and new technologies didn’t make their way into the data center if it didn’t pass their standards. Getting into the data center was just the first step, though, as lengthy deployment of physical infrastructure and provisioning of virtualized instances for applications would require substantial expertise and time. Now, developers can spin up services instantaneously, and infrastructure setup has been reduced to a simple configuration file. It is the developer who understands which resources the application will need, and with infrastructure reduced to a couple lines of code, the speed at which it can be applied is impossible to ignore.
- Microservices create fault tolerance. How we’re building applications also greatly impact how they will run in the future. Historically, you would build a single monolithic service that would respond to every request from the users of that application. This approach meant that when a part of the service failed, everything would go down. However, when you abstract away the infrastructure, you gain the ability to decentralize the application or service into many loosely coupled microservices. This makes the application much more fault-tolerant and reduces the impact of an outage or shortage of resources. As such, developers can help ensure system continuity and performance by building resilience and monitoring capabilities into the software.
End-to-End Visibility and the Need for IT Ops Persists
While developers are certainly on the rise, the role of IT Ops remains uniquely necessary in today’s IT environment. IT Ops will always have the best end-to-end IT system perspective, encompassing the application environment as well as shared services and infrastructure (think backup, endpoint protection, single sign-on, DNS, etc).
Developers build visibility from the inside out. But because it’s happening in the app itself, there’s no outside-in look, and thus pieces of the stack go unmonitored. As a result, you can’t understand the holistic end-user experience—which, when it comes to application health, is both the start of the conversation and the end of the argument. IT Ops brings incredible value, offering end-to-end visibility with better monitoring and a focus on ensuring every transaction—both internal and external—goes smoothly. While it has become common for developers to instrument their applications, they don’t have nearly as much expertise in end-to-end service management and measuring performance across each component. Additionally, IT Ops workers tend to possess a great level of operational rigor; they’re better versed in dealing with third-party vendors; and they understand the entire system (the weakest link, what works, what fails, etc.), including back-end functions, in a way that developers simply don’t.
What Comes Next for Developers?
We’re already seeing how developers are taking greater control over traditional IT operations functions, but what comes next? Looking forward a few years, I believe the next frontier to monitor is the role developers will play in SecOps. Security attacks are about finding the path of least resistance, and as SecOps matures into active threat-hunting and breach detection, attackers will evolve their methods. If SecOps can solve current attack vectors—phishing, especially—tricking software into following unexpected code paths will once again be a reasonable route to a breach.
But there are ways to mitigate that during the development process, by building security into the code itself. As SecOps teams increasingly treat the environment as an ecosystem, they’ll see the application itself as a vulnerable piece of the attack surface; they may begin requiring secure development practices with a level of governance over development teams. As security increasingly becomes everyone’s job, everyone in IT must shift their mindset, and while development teams may be late to the party, SecOps will eventually extend a mandatory invitation.
About the Author / Eric Thomas
Eric Thomas serves as Director of Solutions Architecture for IT analytics company ExtraHop. Eric leads the Professional Services team, and draws on over 20 years of experience in IT operations. Before joining ExtraHop, Eric performed a variety of operational roles, most recently as Director of Advanced Engineering for Thomson Reuters, where he led a team of performance and availability specialists, supporting over 200 applications representing $2B in annual revenue. His prior experience includes Enterprise IT management, SaaS production operations and next-generation technology advocacy.
