XOps has emerged as a popular term–what is it?

XOps featured as one of the top trends in the Gartner Top 10 Data and Analytics Trends for 2021. The report also said that XOps plans to achieve economies of scale using DevOps best practices. XOps will also ensure reliability, reusability, and repeatability and reduce the duplication of technology and processes needed to achieve automation.

What is XOps?

While we are talking about IT modernisation these days, one of its key elements will come from automation. While DevOps can lead us towards it, it is not enough to achieve the full results. With different Ops functions getting popular these days, XOps has emerged as the umbrella term for defining a combination of IT disciplines such as DevOps, DevSecOps, AIOps, MLOps, GitOps, and BizDevOps.

Let us understand these components that make up XOps and how they can transform IT.

Various components make up XOps

• DevOps – DevOps is a software development approach that allows a team to manage the application development pipeline from development and testing to deployment and monitoring. It aims to reduce the duration of any system’s development life cycle while adhering to the requirements of the business. It is made up of various stages like continuous development, continuous integration, continuous testing, continuous deployment, and continuous monitoring.

• BizDevOps – BizDevOps, also known as DevOps 2.0, is an approach to software development that encourages developers, operations staff and business teams to work together so the organisation can develop software more quickly, be more responsive to user demand, and ultimately maximise revenue.

• DataOps – This is a popular process in analytics that is slowly picking up at a good pace. It tries to reduce the cycle time of data analytics projects while improving the quality; it starts right from the beginning of the pipeline (data preparation) and is deployed to various points in the analytics chain and IT operations. Technology is used to automate the design and management of data delivery while adhering to appropriate levels of governance.

• MLOps – MLOps refers to creating, deploying and maintaining machine learning models. It is an umbrella term that involves combining a variety of methods such as DevOps, machine learning, and handling of data that can simplify and build more efficient ways of deploying machine learning algorithms. All of this has to be done while keeping the business goals in mind.

• GitOps – It is the practice of managing infrastructure and application systems using Git (open-source version control system). Open-source leader Red Hat says that GitOps uses Git pull requests to manage infrastructure provisioning and deployment automatically. The Git repository comes with the entire state of the system. This makes it easy to look at all the changes made to the system and work on them further if needed.

• CloudOps – CloudOps refers to managing activities involving optimising IT workloads or services in the cloud. It comes with different aspects such as cloud architecture, software development, security as well as compliance. The goal here is to improve the accessibility and efficiency of cloud services in the business.

Efficient integration is the need of the hour

Questions might arise as to why there is a growing need for XOps. The major issue has been security—the best versions of security can be achieved only when there is a sense of collective responsibility shared across various operations teams. This has to start right from the developers building secure code and applications and analytics applications ensuring the security of data to IT teams building secure pipelines. Development, security, networking and cloud operations have to be integrated effectively to build secure and reliable systems for workloads.