Have we bridged the gap between Data Science and DevOps?
How do Data Science and DevOps fit together? In this article, Richard Gall explains why integrating Data Science with your DevOps can lead to a better and smarter business.
Packt’s Skill Up 2016 survey revealed Data Science and DevOps to be big news for developers. JavaScript and Python, essential programming languages for data scientists, reigned as most popular, whilst DevOps made it into the biggest trends list. As we begin analyzing the data from our Skill Up 2017 survey, it will be interesting to see if this is still the case.
The big question, however, is how Data Science and DevOps fit together. Despite Data Science’s prevalence, Gianmario Spacagna, a data scientist for Barclays Bank in London, told Computing magazine at Spark Summit Europe in October 2015 that, in many instances, there’s not enough impact from Data Science teams. His suggested solution? Build a bridge between Data Science and DevOps:
“If you’re a start-up, the smartest person you want to hire is your DevOps guy, not a data scientist. And you need engineers, machine learning specialists, mathematicians, statisticians, agile experts. You need to cover everything otherwise you have a very hard time to actually create proper applications that bring value.”
Two years on, his idea still makes a lot of sense. It’s become clear over the past few years that ‘data’ itself isn’t enough; it might even be distracting for some organizations. Sometimes too much time is spent in spreadsheets and not enough time is spent actually having an impact. Real value comes from making decisions, building relationships, and building things.
Many organizations are still strategically flawed, in the sense they don’t know how to utilize Data Science. Instead of placing too much focus on what data they have and what they can get, there should be more emphasis on who can access it and what they can do with it. If Data Science isn’t joining these dots, DevOps can help by providing practical solutions, such as building dashboards and creating APIs.
