The growing software penetration and participation

Marc Andreessen famously penned the article Why software is eating the world several years ago. Today, we widely hear, read, and even sometimes experience buzzwords such as software-defined, compute, storage, and networking. Software is everywhere and gets embedded in everything. Software has, unquestionably, been the principal business automation and acceleration enabler. Nowadays, on its memorable and mesmerizing journey, software is penetrating into every tangible thing (physical, mechanical, and electrical) in our everyday environments to transform them into connected entities, digitized things, smart objects, and sentient materials. For example, every advanced car today has been sagaciously stuffed with millions of lines of code to be elegantly adaptive in its operations, outputs, and offerings.

Precisely speaking, the ensuing era sets the stage for having knowledge-filled, situation-aware, event-driven, service-oriented, cloud-hosted, process-optimized, and people-centric applications. These applications need to exhibit a few extra capabilities. That is, the next-generation software systems innately have to be reliable, rewarding, and reactive ones. Also, we need to arrive at competent processes, platforms, patterns, procedures, and practices for creating and sustaining high-quality systems. There are widely available non-functional requirements (NFRs), quality of service (QoS), and quality of experience (QoE) attributes, such as availability, scalability, modifiability, sustainability, security, portability, and simplicity. The challenge for every IT professional lies in producing software that unambiguously and intrinsically guarantees all the NFRs.

Agile application design: We have come across a number of agile software development methodologies. We read about extreme and pair programming, scrum, and so on. However, for the agile design of enterprise-grade applications, the stability of MSA is to activate and accelerate the application design. 

Accelerated software programming: As we all know, enterprise-scale and customer-facing software applications are being developed speedily nowadays, with the faster maturity of potential agile programming methods, processes, platforms, and frameworks. There are other initiatives and inventions enabling speedier software development. There are component-based software assemblies, and service-oriented software engineering is steadily growing. There are scores of state-of-the-art tools consistently assisting component and service-based application-building phenomena. On the other hand, the software engineering aspect gets simplified and streamlined through the configuration, customization, and composition-centric application generation methods. 

Automated software deployment through DevOps: There are multiple reasons for software programs to be running well in the developer's machine but not so well in other environments, including production environments. There are different editions, versions, and releases of software packages, platforms, programming languages, and frameworks. Coming to the running software is suites across different environments. There is a big disconnect between developers and operation teams due to constant friction between development and operating environments. 

Further on, with agile programming techniques and tips, software applications get constructed quickly, but their integration, testing, building, delivery, and deployment aspects are not automated. Therefore, concepts such as DevOps, NoOps, and AIOps have gained immense prominence and dominance to bring in several automation enabling IT administrators. That is, these new arrivals have facilitated a seamless and spontaneous synchronization between software design, development, debugging, deployment, delivery and decommissioning processes, and people. The emergence of configuration management tools and cloud orchestration platforms enables IT infrastructure programming. That is, the term Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is facilitating the DevOps concept. That is, faster provisioning of infrastructure resources through configuration files, and the deployment of software on those infrastructure modules, is the core and central aspect of the flourishing concept of DevOps. 

This is the prime reason why the concept of DevOps has started flourishing these days. This is quite a new idea that's gaining a lot of momentum within enterprise and cloud IT teams. Companies embrace this new cultural change with the leverage of multiple toolsets for Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD), and Continuous Deployment (CD). Precisely speaking, besides producing enterprise-grade software applications and platforms, realizing and sustaining virtualized/containerized infrastructures with the assistance of automated tools to ensure continuous and guaranteed delivery of software-enabled and IT-assisted business capabilities to mankind is the need of the hour.