The meek may inherit the earth, but at this rate, DevOps will inherit the enterprise. At least, that's one lesson to take from a Puppet Labs survey of over 4,000 IT operations and development professionals. Whereas developers used to be second-class citizens within the enterprise, today they're taking on new authority and forcing a change in mindset as to how software is developed and deployed.

(DevOps, for those not in the know, is a relatively recent style of collaboration between software developers and IT departments intended to speed the deployment of new applications and services.)

This enterprise shift reveals itself in a number of ways. As 451 Research analyst Jay Lyman illustrates, DevOps communities around Puppet and Chef, two of the industry's most popular configuration management tools, have been booming, as have the commercial opportunities for Puppet Labs and Opscode, the two respective companies behind these tools. But there is one particular sign that DevOps is making waves in the enterprise, Lyman notes:

Further evidence of these tools and practices going mainstream lies in expanded integration and support for Windows management and Microsoft environments, which represent a growing number of customers for CFEngine, Opscode and Puppet Labs.

Small wonder, then, that Puppet Labs found a 26% increase in the rate of DevOps adoption by organizations of all sizes, compared to 2011, with 63% of organizations now indicating they use DevOps practices. This could be easily discounted — "Well, of course a DevOps-oriented vendor survey would find lots of DevOps adoption" — except that one would expect the numbers to actually be higher. Given that Puppet Labs presumably sells to the converted, why isn't the number 100%? Presumably because even among those interested in Puppet Labs configuration management tools, the ambition to deploy DevOps practices outpaces real-world adoption of them.

But that's changing at a 26% clip. More revealingly, such DevOps adoption translates into a 75% jump in job listings: 

Why is DevOps reshaping enterprise IT? Quite simply, because it works. Because IT operations and development are better in collaboration than in competition. As the survey uncovered, high-performing, DevOps-savvy organizations deploy code 30 times faster with 50% fewer failures. And, strikingly, the longer DevOps practices are followed within an organization, the lower that organization's app failure rate and the faster its recovery from failure:

Source: Puppet Labs

While some of DevOps' rise can rightly be credited to a startup ethos and the evangelism of companies like Puppet Labs, it also gets a boost from IBM, ostensibly the most fuddy-duddy company on the planet. RedMonk analyst Donnie Berkholtz notes:

IBM’s people really get it. They understand trends that are happening at the frontlines of tech today in startups and in open-source development. IBM is way out in front on enabling DevOps in big enterprises....A lot of my experience with enterprises is that they’re slow-moving and often lagging trends by years, to the point where it’s nearly laughable, but in this case IBM is definitely a front-runner.

Embedded in that comment is perhaps the biggest reason for the rise of DevOps within the enterprise: it mirrors the rise of open source. Or, rather, follows it. Open source puts developers in charge of their IT. Hence, as we find a massive spike in demand for Linux professionals, and as we see the top job trends dominated by open-source technologies, we should expect DevOps to rise along with it, both in the startup and in the enterprise, with significant benefits for all.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

Having recently spun out its developer-focused technology into Pivotal Labs, VMware is back at the DevOps table with a $30 million investment in Puppet Labs, a leading open-source vendor of cloud automation tools.  The investment also comes with a partnership whereby the two companies will "work together towards more extensive automation and orchestration across infrastructure and application elements for VMware-based private and public clouds, physical infrastructures, OpenStack and Amazon Web Services." But given that VMware's $30 million investment represents two-thirds of Puppet Labs' total capital raised, the question must be asked: does it also come with serious strings attached?

Knowing Puppet Labs founder and CEO Luke Kanies, probably not.

No One's Puppet

It's not surprising that VMware would want to invest in Puppet Labs. After all, Puppet has become an enterprise standard for automating IT infrastructure. There are scads of big companies using Puppet, including Google, Harvard, and 24/7 Real Media. While the IT automation is increasingly crowded, with Opscode and SaltStack competing for open-source eyeballs and big vendors like IBM and BMC also in the ring, Puppet Labs has become the go-to technology today for companies with serious infrastructure automation needs. With reference to Opscode, specifically, I've heard it said that companies with existing infrastructure use Puppet, whereas startups born in the cloud tend to gravitate toward Chef (Opscode).

All of which fits well into VMware's customer profile. But does VMware fit into Puppet Labs' plans going forward? And how does Puppet Labs retain its independence given that so much of its funding now comes from one vendor, adding to the funding it already raised from Cisco and Google, as well as a smaller amount from VMware in an earlier round?

For those who know Kanies, this is a bit of a silly question.

I've been friends for years with Kanies, and advised the company early on before it had taken funding. Back then it was just two guys (Kanies and co-founder Andrew Shafer, who has since gone on to work at Cloudscaling and OpenStack and is currently working on a stealth startup), and I was fortunate to spend time with them, working through likely business models. Kanies was somewhat reluctant to take funding then, as he wanted his independence. If you know Kanies, you know that independence is a big deal with him. Raised on a hippie commune in Tennessee (yes, really), Kanies isn't the sort of person to sell his soul, or independence, for $30 million.

Not that doing so for VMware dollars would be a terrible outcome. It seems likely that $30M was second prize in VMware's mind; that it would have preferred an outright acquisition. But with the investment, which Kanies says leaves VMware as a minority shareholder, Kanies gets the money to scale Puppet Labs without the strings attached (sorry, couldn't resist). As Shafer related to me over IM:

The cloud transition is creating growth opportunities for next generation systems management products. The alliance will be great for Puppet Labs and great for VMware. It's important to remember that VMware is building a portfolio of core infrastructure pieces that are rooted in open source, and has given them some autonomy even after acquisition. Puppet Labs has a preexistent relationship with a number of these open-source communities, like OpenStack, which should be complemented by this investment.

Or as Kanies tells me, when asked whether this investment means he's locked into VMware-only infrastructure: "Puppet's strength is in supporting heterogeneous environments, whether physical or virtual servers running on-premise or in the cloud, we support a broad array of infrastructure and are agnostic as to whether it comes from Red Hat, Microsoft, or VMware."

Translation?  Kanies is no tool.  Or a puppet.