The second striking fact noted by Vogels is that during November 2010, Amazon.com completely transitioned its web server tier to AWS. If one thinks about the enormous load Amazon experiences during the holiday shopping season (the company is by far the largest online retailer), it's clear that AWS is capable of managing huge application loads. Moreover, given the fact that AWS supported all of the Amazon.com holiday shopping while still supporting everyone else's cloud computing indicates just how much infrastructure AWS has available.

On the subject of , one panel devoted to DevOps described it as a cultural change in IT, being marked by a change in the relationship between application developers and infrastructure administrators. Frankly, I am a bit uncomfortable with any emerging trend within IT being characterized first and foremost as a cultural change. It seems to me that the cultural change phrase is used as shorthand to summarize a range of process and organization changes that result from managing the application lifecycle as an end-to-end seamless process rather than as a series of disjointed way stations.

To my mind, DevOps results from the integration of operations requirements upstream in the project lifecycle, with operations personnel participating in projects much earlier than in the past, so that systems will be more robust and deliver higher SLAs.

In addition, many of the operations tasks traditionally implemented by human administrators are captured in automation policies and code so that when the application is in production it can autonomically respond to changing conditions. This change in timing and implementation has the effect of changing the relationship between developers and operations--an undoubtedly positive effect--so that applications are more agile, scalable, robust, and crucially, less expensive to operate. An important point is that DevOps applications that operate in this manner tend to be part of a business value chain critical to overall company success. Another important point is that DevOps attacks the 50 percent of total data center costs that administration represents. While writing this post, I came across post that describes the transition to DevOps in a very clear manner and that outlines just how different it is from traditional IT organization processes.