Gartner Hype Cycle for Agile and DevOps 2021

Gartner´s Hype Cycle for Agile and DevOps 2021 provides insights into evolving infrastructure and operations (I&O) technologies.

The Gartner Hype Cycle Report for Agile and DevOps 2021 (Hype Cycle) highlights emerging and maturing I&O technologies and processes, and the challenges and solutions for companies when adopting them .

The comprehensive report is an indispensable guide for helping IT leaders navigate today’s quickly changing I&O landscape. It is divided into five phases:

• On the Rise – Breakthrough innovations which bring something new to DevOps processes or fill gaps in existing processes
• Peak of inflated Expectations – The phase at which innovations reach their natural limitations
• Sliding Into the Trough of Disillusionment – Dated innovations no longer in favor
• Climbing the slope of enlightenment – The stage at which organizations better understand an innovation´s applicability, risks and benefits
• Plateau of Productivity – More stable second and third generation releases with higher levels of adoption due to increasing product or process maturity

To provide a better idea of the potential business impact of a process or technology, Garter assigns a benefit rating (“transformational”, “high”, “moderate”, or “low”) and notes the maturity of each technology or process from “embryonic” to “mature mainstream”.

While Gartner provides forecasts of how long it may take an innovation to move from its current phase to mainstream adoption (Plateau of Productivity), the speed at which an organization adopts a technology or process varies due to IT organizational readiness and process maturity rather than an innovation´s technical capabilities.

Hype Cycle Highlights

Hype Cycle provides analyses of the business impacts, drivers, and obstacles of thirty-three technologies and processes, offering user recommendations for each. Below are those that earned a high benefit rating and are forecast to reach the plateau of productivity within five years:

1. Browser-Based Integrated Development Environments (IDEs)

Browser-based IDEs enable remote access to development environments, decoupling the development workspace from the physical workstation and enabling a consistent experience across devices. Although this emerging technology can incur additional costs and its benefit is limited by Internet connectivity, the ability to centrally manage, govern, and secure development environments should overcome any security or compliance concerns.

2. Programmable Infrastructure (aka Infrastructure-as-Code)

Although Gartner categorizes programmable infrastructure as approaching the peak of inflated expectations, its analysts note that, in addition to ensuring optimal resource utilization while driving cost-efficiencies, the adoption of programmable infrastructure also drives adaptive automation. This enables organizations to respond faster to new business infrastructure demands, ensuring service quality and freeing staff from performing manual operations.

3. Infrastructure Automation

Infrastructure automation empowers DevOps and I&O teams to design and implement self-service, automated delivery services across on-premises and cloud environments. According to Gartner, the benefits of infrastructure automation include greater agility, productivity gains, cost improvement, and risk mitigation (as standard configurations help drive compliance). According to Gartner, due to its reliability, infrastructure automation has quickly achieved mainstream maturity.

4. Application Release Orchestration (ARO) Tools

Application Release Orchestration (ARO) tools combine deployment automation, pipeline management, and environment management with release orchestration in order to provide transparency improvements to the release management process.

5. Continuous Configuration Automation

With their ability to manage and deliver infrastructure and associated software and configuration changes as code, Contiguous Configuration Automation (CCA) tools promote operational efficiency while pursuing DevOps initiatives.

Honorable Mentions

Gartner’s Hype Cycle highlights and categorizations change often.  For example, in the 2020 Hype Cycle, immutable infrastructure was at the peak of inflated expectations. Since then, it has fallen into the trough of disillusionment, as infrastructure automation has made many of its capabilities obsolete. To ensure your infrastructure investments are paying off, organizations must stay abreast of industry news and developments.

For more information about the technologies highlighted in Gartner´s Hype Cycle for Agile and DevOps and to discuss ways to upgrade your infrastructure, contact us to arrange a personalized review.