Omdia has published a Universe report on DevOps Release Management solutions, 2023, with an emphasis on enterprise solutions.
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Summary
While there are many free and open source tools to perform DevOps continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), enterprises need tools that go beyond the basics: supplier stability, knowing a provider will be around in five years’ time; ease of use for managing complex and large scale deployments; providing updates and security patches across all the open source components; and mining project lifecycle data to provide insights into development bottlenecks and ensuring optimal application/product delivery. This enterprise focus is to be found in the latest Omdia Universe on DevOps Release Management solutions, 2023.
The changing landscape of release management
The proliferation of free and open source tools for agile and DevOps software development have transformed how developers work and they continue to do so, using the latest wave of cloud native computing powered by Kubernetes and other projects housed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Enterprises are now catered for by a growing number of solutions that can meet their needs as described in the summary. The software application release management space is now largely a matter of enterprise management solutions running on top of open source tools. However, the vendors look to differentiate themselves by diversifying into areas that can have an impact on release management. One such approach is value stream management, technology that originated with lean thinking and which revolves around a live Kanban view of the development lifecycle. Another approach is to go beyond infrastructure as code with policy as code. This is where policies such as rules relating to security, compliance, risk, and application delivery can be codified and consequently better managed and standardized across the organization. A key differentiator that Omdia found in writing the DevOps Universe report is the capability to automate delivery at scale.
How DevOps is evolving
Writing this DevOps focused Universe gave an opportunity to assess the state of DevOps. Today it has largely melted into the background and is practiced by most organizations, although the degree of maturity is variable. While initiatives such as DevSecOps attempt to inject new life into the form, by emphasizing the need for application security (it should really be named SecDevOps due to the shift left approach), there is growing interest in site reliability engineering and platform engineering as a way of identifying the essential role that remains for ops. We find that most large organizations have multiple application development teams and activities with a multi-dimensional spectrum of delivery speeds, agile and DevOps maturity, risk and security requirements, and degree of mission criticality to the business. So, while DevOps is out there, its maturity is a mixed picture.
Appendix
Author
Michael Azoff, Chief Analyst, Cloud and Data Center Practice
