Scott Spendolini reports: DevOps is taking the world by storm

DevOps has actually taken the industry by storm in a lot of ways. Docker-- you really can't talk DevOps without Docker, I don't think. Everybody's moving a lot of their environments to these Docker containers. Very easy to spin up, very easy to destroy. If you need to do a retrofit of a patch, you could just create a new Docker environment in seconds now, test that patch, deploy your changes. Everything's really also moving to this automated method where everything's continuously integrated, so patches get pushed out, patches get tested, they get applied. And really what it results in is quicker time to resolution from the customer's side. So older ways-- you'd have a database, you'd need a DBA to come in, copy Prod over to Dev, make sure the data was set up. Then a lot of times they get picky when it comes to security-- I need this access, I need to log in here. It might take three or four days just to get the environment configured. Now, with Docker, a lot of this stuff is scriptable. So literally click a button or run a script. You've got that data. It's pulling the data files you need. It's doing whatever scripts need to be applied, and you're good to go typically the time to make a cup of coffee, with this new way to do things. The biggest barrier is lack of time. I'm not as young as I used to be, and seeing Docker and thinking in my head, wow, this is just like a VM-- I don't need this-- was what stopped me for a while from adopting it. Once I sat down and actually looked at it, and played with it, and tried it, and had someone explain it a little bit better, it made a lot more sense. So change. Change is always scary. It's always perceived as bad. But once you get on the other side of that change-- again, why was I using VMs for the development projects that I worked on for so darn long? There's a better way to do things. So that to me is really the biggest barrier, is just-- afraid of change. Fear. Changing the way you develop, understanding that things are going to be automated, and some of the hard parts of development, the not-fun parts of development, have been automated. And that's a good thing, and embracing that is really the only way you're going to get over that hump of the fear of change.