As time goes on our understanding and adoption of DevOps deepen and widens respective contributing to new techniques, tools as well as processes that bring IT operations and developers together. In 2019, DevOps trends leaned towards tightly integrating security with development lifecycles in addition to operations workflows.
In 2020, the sediments are changing and it would be essential to look at what the trends are and the anticipation of the developers and IT operators. In the same year, Artificial Intelligence, automation, and AIOps were more often adopted and researched by DevOps experts. Besides, containers and functions-as-a-service grew to enable operations teams and developers to have greater control of their infrastructure, applications, and environments without hindering speed. There was increased observability as APM tools, traces or errors tracking functionalities and logging software were more robust. Through continuous improvement, product teams, businesses, and software engineering teams enhanced collaboration across various departments resulting in smarter workflow management besides increased transparency into operations. If you are looking forward to having software development for your business, it would be important you understand the methodology they use including DevOps and the emerging trends in this methodology.
A collection study showed that DevOps market yielded 2.9 million in the year 2017 and it was estimated that the market will clinch $6.6 billion come 2022, according to estimates from IDC. In the area of software development, DevOps has been a key element that has shaped how the process of developing software is carried and experts predict that it will continue to be a mainstream feature in the field often reaching its peak in 2020. Businesses are showing an increased interest in DevOps and adopting the practices and technologies related to the process.
In essence, in 2019 there was:
So, what are the top DevOps trends that we expect to see in 2020?
Engineering managers, IT security professionals and systems admins are now continuing to understand DevOps better. Today, there are less of DevOps Engineers conversations and more of a holistic or all-inclusive DevOps approach to engineering as well as the business. IT operations teams and developers are realizing that there are problems between siloed DevOps practices or teams and more collaborative approaches to app development, testing, deployment, and operations cycles. Rather than concentrating on teaching developers to learn IT knowledge and teaching IT professionals to learn programming languages, a software development company can opt for processes that can pull optimal value out of each member on the team. You will find that engineers are beginning to specialize in their field and having a greater understanding of the other applications or infrastructure. This, in turn, leads to a fast development process with more resilient services.
A Commonplace for DevOps adoption and Knowledge
As more software development teams adopt DevOps, many individuals are beginning to understand the foundation of the technologies and skills. Things like chaos engineering and unit testing are a common thing in engineering organizations. This helps drive less confusion in topics and leads to fewer individuals searching what these terms are on Google. Many practices that were in fashion within the last five years are now becoming old hat not only for DevOps software developers but also for IT professionals.
Rather than only developers dealing with coding, engineers are now accountable for the coding they do or the code they write. They take on-call responsibilities as well as respond to alerts prompted in real-time whenever there are problems within the software they are developing and maintaining. The teams are more comfortable when they work with more ambiguity in operations and developer roles. This has resulted in better collaboration with more buy-ins for the DevOps environment or culture.
Growth of Cloud Computing, Adoption, and Storage
Amazon Web Services is a market leader when it comes to cloud computing, operations, and storage, however Azure and GCP are seeing amazing growth too. DevOps inspired teams are shifting to the cloud to help facilitate faster changes in production and improve visibility among different applications and infrastructure. The teams are also building more resilient architecture. With could services like Azure, GCP, and AWS, they are able to turn functions, infrastructure, and platforms into easy-to-operate services like IaaS, FaaS, and PaaS. DevOps organizations can now be able to make changes faster when they address scalable hardware problems using code.
The companies offering custom software development have different options for cloud solutions that they can use when developing your website, app, or software product.
A Symbiotic relationship in SRE and DevOps
Engineers are going to combine the use of site reliability engineering (SRE) and DevOps within many organizations. Something to mention here is that despite the conflation, the two – DevOps and SRE are quite different disciplines and now teams can recognize that. In 2020, the expertise and knowledge of these two functions will continue to grow and businesses will begin to realize the value of the functions. DevOps may be seen as a mindset or methodology for enhanced collaboration within operations teams and developer teams, SRE is considered specific technical expertise that is held by engineers. In software development site reliability engineers have the task of writing code and application of software development solutions within the IT operations as well as infrastructure problems. When it comes to DevOps culture, there is a shift to greater collaboration and transparency within the different phases in the app development process including product development, testing, production, and deployment. Businesses are discovering how DevOps and SRE can work together to propel resilient continuous product deployment pipelines.
CI/CD to be a Requirement Rather than Something of Interest
When you look at Google Trends, you find that there has been a drop in search interests for continuous integration as well as continuous deployment or continuous delivery. Such a trend indicates that teams now perceive CI/CD as a standard in the software development process and not something that is nice-to-have. The reduction in search for the terms also shows that many individuals have realized the nuance in CI and CD. CI/CD can help developer teams to increase value in app development and resolve incidents easily and seamlessly rollback changes. Having CI/CD pipelines that are well-built not only improves the speed of product development but also enhances the overall reliability of the support services. The year 2020 will see the normalization of DevOps and CI/CD.
Automation to be a Major Focus
Organizations implementing DevOps have been able to witness increased efficiency and faster deployment of software or apps. DevOps automation is common and businesses can see the changes. Zero-touch automation is expected to be the future. It’s crucial that developers understand the 6C’s within the DevOps cycle and learn how to apply automation between the various phases. Automation in these phases will be a big objective for the teams in 2020.
Shift from CI Pipelines to the so-called DevOps Assembly Lines
When you apply the DevOps practices, it helps improve the collaboration occurring between planning and automating the delivery procedure. The software development teams and IT teams are able to build, test, and deploy software fast and reliably. Now, we won’t just be talking of Continuous Integration (CI) but Continuous Delivery (CD). Businesses will invest in effort and time to try understanding what’s all about the automation of their entire software development process. As we have ushered 2020, attention is now shifting from the CI pipeline and heading towards DevOps assembly lines. Among the benefits of assembly lines include powerful nested visibility, fast onboard along with scale with as-code practice, native integrations, perfect continuous delivery along with interoperability, and team-based intelligence as well as for analytics of business.
Increased AI and a Boost in Data Science
There is an increasing number of artificial intelligence-powered apps that will help push the data science team to seek DevOps practices in their workflows. A prominent option for the data science teams will be the DevOps method when dealing with automated pipelines, maintenance and test of numerous deployed software models within the production chain. When the dev teams and data science teams move towards achieving high efficiency, the practice is going to boost further the automated pipelines and deployment of multiple models. There will be efficiency in the management of AI and machine learning (ML)-powered apps in addition to the deployment and development of the apps.
Emergency of ‘Everything as Code’
Today, the IT sector relies heavily on coding so understanding the various DevOps tools and automation of scripts plays an important role in the development process. In 2020, this trend is going to dominate. The future of software development will depend on the technical capabilities of testers, developers, and operation teams. The aim of DevOps is to ease the delivery cycle meaning there is a need to use code that can enhance the efficiency of the software development cycle. ‘Everything as Code’ will be a build-in practice within the DevOps method and it will be seen in SDLC where it will create a trend in 2020 DevOps. It’s expected that Software Testers who don’t learn code and be able to write their test script are going to be hit hard.
Increased use of Server-less Architecture
It’s is possible to reach the peak level of DevOps with server-less architecture. While not exactly a free-of-server practice, there will be a cloud service taking care of the entire architecture. The unusual architecture will allow the software developer to focus on part of application or implementation. Some of the aspects of this kind of architecture are FaaS and BaaS. When the teams apply server-less architecture, they are able to save time and minimize the costs thus ensuring resilience in the workflow.
AI and Data Science to Support Automation
Zero-touch automation is the main objective in DevOps in 2020. The increased use of Artificial Intelligence, as well as Data Science and Machine Learning, has been a game-changer. You can have apps being powered with AI something that pushes DevOps teams to consider automation possibilities to find out the prospects in their workflow streams.
Increased Embedded Security
There is exponential growth regarding security breaches and how they impact on the reputation of a software development company. This has made the cyber-security a business imperative. As we usher in 2020, DevOps are going to embrace security in depth. In recent times, DevSecOps have domineered the software development sphere with the injection of security first within the software development lifecycle. This in turn as reduce vulnerabilities and improved the software development company reputation. We will see this trend of DevSecOps heighten in 2020.
Kubernetes to Evolve More
As a container technology, Kubernetes has been growing widely. On the global scene, technologists, as well as CIOs, have been opting for Kubernetes since it offers a streamed way of developing software and apps and this trend is expected to continue growing in 2020. In 2019, many companies offering software development services started adopting Kubernetes embracing containers for operating cloud-native applications or apps. Several old fashioned DevOps functions will be replaced by container orchestration software in 2020.
Conclusion
Software developers will need to understand the trends in DevOps because they will help in streamlining the app development process. The developers have to implement robust plans so that they manage their resources and test tools within the new environment while at the same time facilitating continuous delivery and testing.
I am Kuldeep Kundal, CMO at expertsfromindia.com, a trademark of Cyber Infrastructure (P) Limited (CIS), India. Being inquisitive, I love to share my views on technology trends and management strategies. Since your website also holds the same interest in sharing knowledge on diverse fields, I would be highly obliged if you can publish my blogs on your website.