When it comes to automated applications deployment, is DevOps is a reality for most teams — or just a concept that gets a lot of attention?
There is a new understanding that one size does not fit all when it comes to the business of automated applications deployment. The historic context that puts the responsibility for change and release management in development or operations was in part a response to the needs of the business long ago and to the personalities of the players of the day.
Today many different forces are placing new demands on change and release management, which are stretching traditionally organized teams in a myriad of ways. There is pressure from the development team to reduce controls around code moving from development to unit testing, to user testing, to system testing, to staging. And there is pressure from the business side of the organization to reduce cycle times to keep pace with competitors. In addition, business is making demands around governance and auditing, asking for greater visibility, accountability and traceability.
Whether we call this DevOps or not, all of these things fall under the DevOps umbrella. Software change and release management all over the world has become increasingly important to how organizations conduct business.
Let’s look at the continuous delivery movement. This developer-driven trend automates the movement of code from stage-to-stage of the lifecycle. It automatically provisions the target platforms and requires little human intervention. We trade control and oversight for automation and standardization. The result is that code travels much further down the path to production before anyone intervenes with human checks and balances. This process is much more efficient than keeping developers and testers waiting for changes to move along the process.
How about the mythical "emergency" process? All organizations are experiencing our unplanned code changes — or patches — that are slipped in the at last minute as business demands. What was once about the rare need to remediate a broken technology is now the daily norm for business-critical changes. Unmanaged and unplanned, these kinds of changes will lead to chaos. That’s not something we associate with change and release management.
So, in today’s high velocity world, where revenue generating apps might undergo several "turns" of changes every month, there is a renewed focus on release management.
Source: http://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/answer/Automated-applications-deployment-DevOps-no-matter-what-you-call-it
