Devops Tools Are Growing Up

In a recent talk at QCon, Yevgeniy Brikman asserted that the DevOps industry is in “the stone ages.” That’s a bold statement, and we generally agree, but not completely. It is true that nearly all of the tooling in the DevOps space is not yet enterprise class, but it is also true that some tooling, like our Guide-Rails_®® platform, is emerging from the mix-and-match set of DevOps tools as a mature, cohesive, enterprise grade solution.

Homegrown, cobbled-together tools fail as organizations grow

As a company grows larger, teams realize that their home grown tools no longer meet their needs. The spreadsheet that can run a small business then grows into a gargantuan beast of shared spreadsheets with pivot tables and all kinds of functions for a medium business. At some point someone realizes that they have staff that are spending more time running homegrown accounting systems than doing the actual accounting. Or, they become aware that multiple teams are all running different homegrown solutions. Not long after, a search for an enterprise accounting solution begins. Similar things happen within human resources , project management, sales and all of the other parts of a large, multi-national corporation.

Growing up

No longer do successful enterprises invest internal resources in building homegrown solutions for core business functions. Smart companies don’t deploy their software engineers to create HR systems, ERP systems, or CRM systems… they subscribe

It takes time for the enterprise solutions to grow up. In the 80’s you saw businesses move into monolithic ERP and accounting systems to manage finances. Then in the 90’s the rise of large HR systems helped manage the seriously complicated needs of an enterprise full of human labor.

More recently the rise of CRM, content, and project management tools in the cloud allow companies to scale to thousands and tens of thousands of employees — all benefitting from a tool and framework that keeps everyone on the same page and focused on the goal of customer satisfaction in a way that cannot be managed by a spreadsheet.

Now, it is DevOps’ turn. It is time to move from a patchwork of homegrown tools that depend on one or two in-the-know engineers to run. It’s time to free up your developers to able to move at the speed of customer expectations: to be able to commit a piece of code and have it deploy in minutes, to be able to rise to agreed upon test coverage, security requirements and code quality, and for everyone to have the visibility into the work that is being done.

It’s not the stone ages; welcome to the DevOps age. Guide-Rails_® was built for the Enterprise DevOps age. Schedule time to talk to us.