TT Poll: Digging Into DevOps

While DevOps has moved beyond the initial hype phase, the technical transformation road for enterprises and service providers to fully implement it can be chock full of potholes.

The term "DevOps" can be somewhat nebulous based on how it's being applied across different verticals, but at its most basic level it means, as the same suggests, integrating the development and operational teams.

For a service provider, DevOps can include breaking down the services silos, such as voice, video, data and mobile, in order to create cross-disciplinary groups that work towards the same overarching goal.

By blending skill sets and giving employees multi-dimensional roles, a faster, more agile mindset emerges, which can speed up the development of new services and applications, or at the very least, "fail fast." (See Comcast Embraces DevOps for Faster, Smarter App Development.)

While all of that sounds like a no-brainer, DevOps can be complicated because it requires cultural transformations, new automation processes and software elements and a means of measuring the successes or failures with key performance indicators (KPIs). (Accenture recently posted a blog on the principles of DevOps.)

A recent Telco Transformation Flash Poll asked: "How is your company implementing a DevOps strategy?" The poll's results were pretty even across the board, but "The DevOps model is being used in some areas, but not across the board," earned the most votes at 34%.

Coming in second was "Everyone is responsible for working with a DevOps mindset" at 26% while "Dev and Ops are not working in tandem most of the time" was a close third with 22%. Bringing up the rear of the DevOps poll peloton was "We're not, we're tied to legacy OSS for the time being" at 18%.

DevOps Poll Results

— Mike Robuck, Editor, Telco Transformation