<p>Just as virtualisation has transformed data centre operations, the emergence of cloud computing represents a significant shift in the way IT operates applications today. Up until now, IT ops teams have been driven by a server-centric operations model, where the application itself played a secondary role. Cloud computing, on the other hand, is an application-centric operations model.</p><p>As applications get more distributed, virtualised and pushed into the cloud, application developers and architects are faced with a multitude of challenges in how they develop, deliver and manage applications with this new paradigm.The emergence of application-centric operations</p><p>Applications that run in the cloud still need to be highly available, resilient and adaptable to varying loads and monitored as they were before. What changes, however, is that these features that were provided in the past by the IT ops infrastructure now need to be part of the application itself. Now, these operational capabilities need to become a part of the development environment. In this new application-centric environment, operations teams will need to collaborate with the developers who create these applications; this new breed is also known as 'DevOps.'</p><p>Matthias Marschall of Agile Web Development and Operations says the DevOps team is "a growing group of people practicing a new way of combining development and system administration for more speed, quality, revenues and fun."ADCs and DevOps</p><p><a href="http://www.itproportal.com/2013/06/21/the-rise-of-devops-how-cloud-computing-is-changing-it-application-delivery/">Keep reading...</a></p>