The DevOps India Summit (DOIS) is hailed as the largest DevOps event in South Asia. There are a disproportionate number of developers in India (6M out of the worldwide 27M) so this event takes on great importance in the software development industry. DOIS, which happened virtually this year on August 27^th and 28^th, included two days of speaking sessions, parallel talks, discussions, and thoughts being shared across the globe.

The Summit did not focus on the pandemic and there was little-to-no discussion on the “unprecedented times”, work from home, security and business continuity, operational challenges, and the impact of the pandemic on the ways of working in the IT industry. It was as if the industry has gotten accustomed to the new norm and it is now business as usual. So, what does “business as usual” look like to the largest developer community in the world? Below are a few themes I gathered from multiple thought leaders:

DevOps is going to play its part in sustainability

Green development and choices that organizations will make in the coming years will dictate how software will be built. It’s all hands on the deck as far as sustainability is concerned, so why should the developer be agnostic?

What does it mean to do green software development? It’s about the choices; Python or C, GCP or AWS, automate or manual. Developers will be asked to make green choices and will be asked to align with the overall organization’s carbon footprint goals.

Everyone is answerable to the customer

My friend who works at Amazon and sits in leadership meetings every month says that the one question that is constantly asked in these meetings is “how will it help the customer?”. Every idea, every product, every new thought needs to answer this one question. For the longest time, the developers and designers have been the creative folks who needed the freedom to be able to create, and creation was mostly done in isolation.

Value stream management (VSM), as we are seeing, is “Day 2 DevOps” or that next phase of DevOps evolution that many organizations are in now. The developer and the development and operations teams, including sales and marketing as well as finance and HR, are all answerable to the customer. It’s taken for granted that there are metrics, there is visibility, there is efficiency in the system, there are reports and there is speed. But how does all this deliver business value? The teams are Agile, they have automated testing, they are deploying to production faster, but how does that translate to better NPS? How does it translate to greater market share? How does this translate to faster customer service?

It’s about completing the loop and connecting the dots between data points (which is precisely what HCL Accelerate does). The metrics are not good enough. For a CFO/CEO who is making investments in developing new software to better serve their customers, the loop must close.

Auto healing supports governance

It’s not good enough to detect and report faults. The faults need to be healed automatically. This is found in testing, deployment, source code management, version control, and planning All products need to have innate intelligence to autocorrect, be laced with AI/ML, and be on the same platform. Plus, the process of development and operations need to have end-to-end visibility so you can see how a correction will impact dependencies. Our DevOps solutions offer features that detect, remediate, and prevent issues, improving governance throughout your software delivery pipeline.

The role of Open Source

While a free tool can bring about a jump start for smaller teams, security and scale matter a lot more at the enterprise level. But it doesn’t have to be an either-or decision. Let the developers keep using their preferred tools (whether or not that’s open source) then build an enterprise tool ecosystem on top of this for security, testing, value stream management, and more. Our solutions don’t require a “rip and replace” mentality, but add enterprise-level security, scaling, and analysis to a diverse toolchain.

The DevOps India Summit was an interesting two days to hear from multiple thought leaders and innovators about the past, present and future of DevOps. If you attended the conference, share your own thoughts on the event in the comments!