The highly adaptive and fast-paced schedule of deployment and development of the service-based and application software market has driven companies to push hard for faster-and-faster cycles. This in turn has put a strain on the humans behind the scenes as well as the hardware. DevOps ideally uses the power of computing to make it easier on developers to keep up with the rigors of rapid feature and fix cycles.

However, how does DevOps from 2013 stack up to what’s going to be expected in 2014?

“Embracing DevOps is a cultural shift for organizations. Their entire organization needs to operate differently if they are to fully take advantage of the benefits of DevOps and cultural change is hard in any organization,” says Rajat Bhargava, CEO, JumpCloud.

This sentiment is echoed by JumpCloud’s VP of Engineering Christopher (Topher) Marie who believes that DevOps is still getting a foothold but the status quo is changing. The cultural technology of DevOps will likely see some resistance from entrenched interests in the market who already have a game they’re good at even as they scale themselves to the new market.

What about when people misunderstand the methodology of DevOps?

The adoption and use of DevOps practices isn’t all sugar-and-spice and with any new method being sold as almost a “magic bullet” it has some pitfalls. Ideally, the adopters of DevOps will do so with practical measures, enabling the practices in ways that will increase communication, decrease workload, and allow teams to scale with changing needs.

However, Morgan Logan, Founder of DevOps.com, points out people will stumble when adopting DevOps because of potential information overload in 2014.

“DevOps, like the practices from the agile movement, is easily misunderstood and applied poorly,” Logan explains. “I’ve seen continuous deployment pipelines put in place that use different binaries from what was tested. I have seen pipelines with scant checks and I have seen people eschew manual testing on apps that really needed it. This among many other misapplications runs the risk of people getting burned and becoming opponents of DevOps misguidedly.”

We at SiliconANGLE hope to provide a roadmap in 2014 highlighting the positive practices of DevOps and how developers are embracing new technologies. And this also means shining a spotlight on when it goes poorly as often as when it goes well. As with any growing cultural interest there’s no one-size-fits-all and that’s why so many tools are blossoming on the market right now.

To wit, Logan adds, “There is also such a proliferation of tools and approaches lately as well as so many new sources of information that it is becoming hard for folks to know where to start.”

With so many big companies (e.g. IBM, HP, CA Technologies) baking up their own DevOps-related tools and testing outfits such as Telerik and Sauce Labs providing suites to do testing and Q&A, as well as server-management companies like JumpCloud on the cloud-server side it’s going to get harder to find a good fit.

In many ways, the very thing that will make the DevOps cultural- and tool-market so worthwhile for enterprise and business looking to embrace DevOps practices will also be one of its biggest challenges.

Stay tuned for part 2 of this series as we wrap up the questions with industry luminaries.