As global companies strive to push business transformation through digital transformation, multiple DevOps trends have bubbled to the surface in advance of a new year and a new decade.
As global companies strive to push business transformation through digital transformation, multiple DevOps trends have bubbled to the surface in advance of a new year and a new decade.
As global companies strive to push business transformation through digital transformation, multiple DevOps trends have bubbled to the surface in advance of a new year and a new decade.
That’s hardly surprising, given the growth of DevOps – now and going forward.
According to IDC, the worldwide DevOps software tools market stood at $5.2 billion in 2018. By 2023, market growth is expected to skyrocket to $15 billion.
“The market is being driven by continued enterprise adoption of highly automated CI/CD, infrastructure provisioning, DevSecOps best practices and advanced infrastructure, and application monitoring and analytics for production as well as dev and test use cases,” notes Jim Mercer, research director, DevOps at IDC. “Our data highlights the impact that enterprise production support for DevOps-driven applications is having on overall market growth.”
Making the case for DevOps in the boardroom: Are you ready?
On a more commercially viable spectrum, enterprises have embraced four key DevOps focus areas over the past several years that should continue to expand in 2020. Each are rapidly evolving and each continue to mature, but come with increasing complexities that will need to be addressed by enterprise users as the 2020’s roll on.
No doubt, while these trends will advance to the center stage in 2020 and beyond, successful implementation will require cultural and mindset changes inside the IT spectrum especially as most organisations merge DevOps tools and services into their business enterprise on the fly.
Here are six and key DevOps and digital transformational trends, and how each will impact global enterprises looking for new software solutions in 2020 – and well beyond.
The Emergence of Cloud Native DevOps in Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Environments. For forward-minded enterprise, the cloud strategy and the business strategy are one and the same. In that regard, the most significant benefit of a cloud-native architecture is speed – basically, a cloud-native strategy takes any enterprise idea and morphs it into an app quickly and efficiently.
Cloud-native computing also leverages multiple technologies and processes, including multi-cloud, microservices, agile methodology, containers, CI/CD, and DevOps and serverless functions, and turns them into a business benefit.
For example, taking advantage of cloud services means using agile and scalable components like containers to deliver discrete and reusable features that easily integrate into an enterprise’s technology platform. That’s especially the case across technology boundaries like multi-cloud, which allows delivery teams to generate faster system outcomes by using repeatable automation and orchestration.
Yes, multiple applications already exist that promise to solve myriad cloud-based problems, including tools for Application Definition and Development, Orchestration and Management, and Runtime and Provisioning. That said, many organisations still struggle to get a single cloud “right.” Once multi-cloud deployments are viewed alongside cloud skills gaps, it becomes crystal clear that IT teams are in trouble.
That’s where cloud-native solutions can be a game-changer. Increased adoption of cloud native and multi cloud strategies in the industry bring in more complex challenges that will deliver right tools and solutions to enterprises when they need them, quickly, seamlessly and efficiently.
DevOps disruptors in 2019
DevOps, properly implemented, offsets the fact that benefits of Microservices come at a cost, even as 63 per cent of enterprises are adopting microservices architectures, according to industry data . By merging DevOps into the mix, multiple smaller microservices steers system complexities to the operational environment, as there are more moving parts to monitor and manage. Plus, resiliency and disaster recovery platforms must change in order to take multiple microservices into consideration.
That’s where a DevOps-Microservices combination can enhance operational efficiencies in 2020. More and more, containers and microservices are helping DevOps and IT teams deploy new features faster than ever before and are significantly improving the reliability of the services those teams maintain.
Automation, Shift Left and DevSecOps Rising. A DevOps approach to application delivery offers several advantages over traditional methodologies, most notably faster and more efficient deployments.
Still, there’s nothing inherent in DevOps that promises more secure delivery or better protection for the applications and their data. (Security is a broader term that is being used here to refer to application/data security, privacy and compliance.)
In fact, DevOps can potentially lead to greater risks if security is not integrated into the development process right from the get-go. After all, in today’s world of escalating cyberattacks and increased privacy and compliance regulations, security should be part of application delivery as much as continuous testing (i.e., test automation) and ongoing integration. Anything less could put the entire organisation at risk.
By fully automating compliance, performance, privacy and security testing, developers can show — with an auditable record — that they have met external regulatory and system security requirements. This makes matters easier on the DevOps team, thus making it more likely the team will comply, and also making for a more robust and productive enterprise environment, as there is no need for developers to manipulate the system in order to produce successful outcomes.
Organisations need to build their infrastructure so that developers and operations partner with compliance and make the job easier for both the DevOps team and the compliance team. This ensures greater enterprise compliance measures and greater security overall.
That’s where enterprises are headed in 2020. Secure DevOps, sometimes referred to as DevSecOps, calls for a “shift left” mindset that steers security and performance to the beginning of the application delivery pipeline, rather than pushing it out at the end, where it can be the most disruptive to application delivery. That change in priorities will be embraced by more IT decision-makers next year.
Traceability
Traceability will be a bigger factor in 2020. There are multiple factors that contribute to greater agility in the Software Development Life Cycle, including emerging methodologies (Scrum, Kanban), tools, tailored processes, architecture, automation, infrastructure, security and technology factors.
With agile software development there are constant changes to multiple parts of a product at the same time. Much like the practice of enterprise software delivery itself, traceability is complex yet it’s quickly becoming one of the biggest technical headaches for organisations worldwide.
Multi-cloud and distributed microservices applications with myriad moving parts make the traceability and versioning of applications even more difficult for the enterprises. For example, the tools that practitioners use in the “plan and design” stage, however, do not naturally integrate with tools further downstream in the “build and deploy” stage. To address this, both functional areas need to be sharing the same information automatically.
By connecting all tools across the value stream, organisations can then visually trace the full lifecycle in highly automated, yet effective fashion. Fortunately, continuous integration, continuous deployment (CI/CD) and release automation via DevOps tools provide solid extensibility through webhooks that can be leveraged for traceability, making it a fast-moving trend for 2020.
AI goes mainstream. With a multiple new tools and services from Azure, GCP and AWS, many industries will start implementing – or at least experimenting – with some level of artificial intelligence implementations for commercial reasons.
For instance, 2020 will see more focus on explainable AI, which will reduce any bias in data analysis and predictions. Data scientists will also increasingly become an integral part of the product teams, working closely to create a “data-first “approach to application development, instead of focusing on making sense of app-generated data outcomes
Accelerated move to agile technologies. Agile trends will fuel a move towards Continuous Delivery, which will accelerate as companies start realising operational and financial benefits. Automation, not just in QA, but across the lifecycle, will also become a more substantial focus in Software development circles.
For example, customers are demanding the same speed and quality across industries and segments, including business-to-business. In 2020, organisations will figure out that Continuous Delivery is the natural evolution of agile technologies and that the benefits far outweigh any initial or even forthcoming issues.
