Agile, DevOps, and cloud form a nearly-holy triumvirate with a standard theme: Software rules.

As software has grown in importance, overshadowing the once-riveting details of chips and hardware, a brand new language has crept into computing’s vernacular. Where when we talked in silicon yields and gigahertz speeds, we now speak of scrums and sprints, DevOps and Continuous Delivery, and most of all, workload deployments to the elastic cloud’s infrastructure.

The genie within the bottle is not any longer the secrets within the hardware; it is the invisible functions of the software.

Even the terminology of software has changed. Prior to now, we’d have declared new development had nothing to do with maintenance of the datacenter’s legacy systems. Development was novel and exciting, something apart. Nor did development methodologies have anything to do with production deployments. And definitely an enterprise software project could proceed and feature nothing to do with the cloud.

But nearly everyone now knows these old verities are less prone to be true. Most folks would say these types of things are actually related, and a few would say, closely related. i’d go a step further. All of these items are an analogous idea, expressed in numerous ways. They reflect the significance of the leading ingredient of economic survival: new software.

[ learn more about agile development working with DevOps? See Where Agile Development Fails: IT Operations.]

The world runs on software. Now we have software-defined virtual servers, software-defined networks, and, soon, software-defined datacenters. It sometimes seems the sector is so depending on software that we’d like it to make the sun rise and set on time. Software-defined sunsets. Thank goodness, that hasn’t happened yet.

Although agile development is all about software, it is not really a collection of technology goals. At its heart, it’s really a belief system. Among other things, its tenets are: Software must reflect the wishes of the business; it should be developed rapidly and timed to the wishes of the business; it have to be delivered already tested and able to run. In brief, the software must better reflect the challenges and realities with which the business is dealing. The agile oath is: We’ll try this better than the waterfall method did.

Likewise, DevOps, though seemingly a fixed of technology methodologies and disciplines, is more like a further belief system. Rackspace CTO John Engates, in a column for InformationWeek, noted how DevOps “holds certain truths to be self-evident.” They’re: “Shipping code faster and more error free is inherently good. Automated testing at scale makes for an easier, safer product. The genuine value of engineering talent isn’t the manual orchestration of tasks, however the insight and creativity to resolve interesting, real-world problems.” In other words, the very best calling of an engineer is in getting the software to mirror the realities of the business and respond with a solution to the challenge of the arena as we discover it. It’s another expression of ways survival is dependent upon software.

So how does cloud computing match up with agile and DevOps? Is cloud a belief system, too? That does not seem too likely. Gotten any feelings of awe and omnipotence out of Amazon lately? Not really, unless you are looking at your bill.

But still, give it some thought. Once software has captured the business’s response to its challenges, it needs someplace to run. That was once — often still is — the enterprise datacenter. But what if the engineers have done one of these good job, solved the challenge so well, that new customers are arriving in droves? The datacenter server cluster is chugging along as best it will possibly, but no person anticipated this much success when the IT budget was drawn up.

Michael Jackson was a rock star who, through much of his life, created and sold a gradual amount of music. When he died, there has been a sudden and seemingly insatiable appetite for his music. The web music store servers chugged and chugged, but they couldn’t come anywhere on the point of maintaining with demand. The wave crested, broke, and receded. So did the chance.

To many on this New Age of Software, it’s a piece of writing of religion that software that reflects big ambitions need to have a large platform on which to run. It will probably not need all of it the time, but if its moment of truth arrives, the platform has to be as big because the opportunity. What agile and continuously improved software needs is an elastic resource, one which can expand with the business. You cannot draw a line where that expansion might stop. It needs, theoretically, to be infinite.

That’s not the cloud, but almost. The cloud offers its users the appearance of infinity. Somewhere there is a physical limit, but with many thousands of users and a few overhead margin for every, there is a very large surplus capacity built into the platform which might be tapped at someone time. And if it gets tapped out, there’s an associated cloud datacenter with its own surplus. To the user who needs that surplus, the cloud is an enormous resource.

It’s not enough to compose excellent software that constantly adjusts to the changing nature of the business. That software should have an acceptable place to run, one whose merits can reflect its ability to grab the instant and capitalize on it. That does not mean that we’re searching anymore for the most recent chips, servers, and switches. It now means the software cloud — which could stir up virtual servers, networks, and storage; catch up on any hardware component’s failure; and keep all systems running. Finally, now we have the intelligent environment we’ve been looking to run our brilliant business software.

Agile, DevOps, and cloud are a nearly-holy triumvirate relating to the realization systems they marshal and engineering aspirations they contain. They’re all looking to do a similar thing: give software, and software alone, its chance to overcome the various competitive hurdles and perils that await us. If software is everything, then embracing the mantras of agile, DevOps, and cloud is a technique to invoke its power. And in doing so, we are hoping to maneuver ourselves, our organizations, and our whole culture another step toward Nirvana.

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Charles Babcock is an editor-at-large for InformationWeek, having joined the publication in 2003. He’s the previous editor-in-chief of Digital News, former software editor of Computerworld and previous technology editor of Interactive Week. He’s a graduate of Syracuse … View Full Bio

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