For all the hype around the Metaverse, very few seem to wonder about how it will be built and maintained. The crucial tool that will make it all possible is DevOps. Dori Exterman, CTO at Incredibuild, talks about how DevOps will be the key to establishing dominance over the metaverse.Â
There’s no question that the Metaverse is here. People are making money, playing games, and even getting married in it. Massive companies are repositioning themselves to meet specific meta-challenges, and stock markets are in a frenzy over potential players. A rash of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that track Metaverse-related companies are already trading. Techies everywhere are gearing up for an impending explosion of development positions in the virtual reality space. Every sector seems to be gearing up to ride the tide.
What’s interesting is that while everyone’s hyper-focused on the race for Meta dominance, fewer are talking about the weapons in play. At the top of the list of the technical arsenal that will determine who wins the first round of the virtual battle (defined by some as the first player to reach one billion users) is a quiet, crucial, yet unsung hero: DevOps.Â
Why Is the Spotlight on DevOps?
DevOps – which defines the way companies develop and release software, including the bones and muscle of the Metaverse – will be the deciding factor not only in who wins today’s race but who ultimately dominates this space tomorrow.
There are numerous types of companies battling for domination. Gaming companies are increasing support and expansion for their Metaverse-like platforms – think Epic (Fortnite) and Microsoft (Minecraft). We can see the rise of Meta content creation platforms like Roblox and Overwolf. Infrastructure end-device players are now producing AR/VR and other interactivity solutions, like Microsoft and Meta. Even hardware players are gunning for chip-level dominance, like Intel, Qualcomm and NVIDIA. DevOps cuts across all these players. The reason? The sheer, unprecedented scale of the meta-universe.Â
Five Key Benefits of DevOps for the Metaverse
Consider the scale of cloud providers today. If AWS or Azure were to have a catastrophic global outage tomorrow – businesses, governments, and significant parts of the digital backbone of society itself would grind to a halt. Now, take that scale, and increase it a thousandfold (or more). This is the scale required to power and maintain this reality. And at this scale, there will be no room for error.Â
DevOps will thus be the lynchpin in the Metaverse to ensure the following benefits:
1. Quicker time to market
Speed and time to market are crucial to support the massive scale of the meta infrastructure and content. It would help continuously introduce new features, content and capabilities, win the first round of Metaverse domination, and maintain a viable position for future rounds. The DevOps framework was conceived and designed to encourage development teams and IT operations teams to collaborate smarter – reducing development time, increasing product quality, improving the management of changes and upgrades, and speeding up time to market.Â
2. Better performance
The development of this hyper-connected virtual reality will demand better exploitation of existing and emerging computing power paradigms like caching, distributed computing, cloud scaling, network accelerators, and more optimized tools and processes. These tools implemented on-prem and in the cloud, enable DevOps teams to streamline performance engineering processes, reduce iteration times, increase throughput and lower latency – closing the Continuous Integration/Continuous Development (CI/CD)  performance gap.
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3. Faster solutions
In a massive project like the Metaverse, bugs will always exist. DevOps takes this into account, enabling dev teams to improve continuously with greater ease, replicate and fix problems faster, recuperate from falls, and ultimately learn to deliver better quality in the first place.
4. Cloud-efficiency
R&D groups in Meta-related companies are already consuming millions of cloud-core hours per month. The budget, however, will always be a factor. DevOps enables cost-effective distributed collaboration and provisioning with a smooth work-from-home experience. By keeping the cloud overhead in check, DevOps can enable on-demand environments, dynamic scalability to nearly infinite resources, and the global spread that can accommodate the Metaverse in both development and production – all without breaking the bank.
5. Continuous delivery
The scale of the Metaverse means that the human factor needs to be removed from the equation. Manual quality assurance is simply not viable – it will lower the quality and be slower in output. No human can test all the moving parts in the multifaceted, hyper-connected simulated space. DevOps runs automated tools that optimize testing for speed and quality. It also crucially decides what not to test, eliminating unnecessary testing that slows build cycles.Â
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What Happens Next?
The Metaverse will be the vehicle of the future that will deliver entertainment and social content and transport people to interact and collaborate. On its shoulders, retail and alternative currencies will thrive, and business will be conducted. The prize for dominating even the first stage of the race is immense – which is why the race (and, admittedly, the hype around it) is intense. As in most races, speed is a crucial factor.
The Metaspace will be like the real world – it will be built, tweaked, and rebuilt. It will constantly expand and evolve faster than today’s fastest ultra-fast iteration domains like Netflix and Facebook. This impending shift will demand more from computing than ever before, and with DevOps, the world will be ready.
Are you ready to shift to the Metaverse? What about the move excites or worries you the most? Share with us on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We’d love to hear your ideas!
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