Bill Portelli

The IT industry is abuzz with conversations regarding continuous delivery, DevOps, and cloud development—and with good reason. Advances in agile software development methods, the integration of these practices into both on-premise and public clouds, and the emergence of end-to-end cloud platforms have been shown to cut development cycles by as much as half, greatly improve quality, and reduce costs. Even though this is an unbelievably exciting time, we need to work together on the issue of the “fractured cloud.”

“DevOps” is a contraction of “development and quality assurance” and “operations” that describes the practice and result of the bi-directional integration of these functions in an enterprise. It is a set of development, quality assurance, and operational tools and processes aimed at achieving the business goal of deploying timely and higher-quality software products and services.

This past Tuesday, December 14th, I attended the U.S. Department of Defense Agile Development Conference in Washington DC put on by the Association For Enterprise Information. During the conference the expanding commitment to agile by the DOD community was clear.

As compared to other development methods, agile is clear, straightforward, and rewarding for all of those who are involved in the process. Most of you know this already—that’s why you’re here! Clearly, a successful transition to agile requires a strong organizational commitment and a number of management and development changes. With that in mind, the white-hot movement to this trend over the past year continues to amaze me. In striking parallel, the industry has seen this same sort of resonance around the trend to the “cloud”—secure anywhere access by distributed teams to a centralized set of services and compute resources that span the complete lifecycle of the development and deployment process.