Originally based on insights from enterprisersproject.com. Quotes and attribution are preserved from the original source.
DevOps Has Grown Up — Now What?
The phrase “DevOps 2020” is a milestone marker. The term — and the culture and practices it represents — has long shed its “new and shiny” status in IT. That doesn’t make DevOps passé; it means it has become pervasive. As organizations at every stage of the adoption curve continue to mature, understanding where the practice is heading matters as much as knowing where it started.
“In 2020, we will see organizations [continue to] embrace DevOps practices at all levels,” says Tom Iverson, Managing Principal, Cloud and DevOps at RBA.
By “levels,” Iverson is not referring to organizational hierarchies. He means that every team’s starting point with DevOps was different — including when they started. More advanced teams may be innovating and optimizing their continuous delivery pipelines, while organizations earlier in the adoption curve might still be experimenting with basic automation or working through the cultural changes that DevOps demands.
Regardless of where your organization sits on that spectrum, the following four trends are worth understanding.
Trend 1: DevOps Maturity Fuels Continued Interest in Cloud-Centric Tools
As DevOps practices mature, they naturally drive adoption of cloud-native technologies. The relationship is bidirectional: DevOps culture pushes teams toward better tooling, and better tooling reinforces the cultural and process improvements that DevOps demands.
One technology stands out as a clear example of this dynamic: Kubernetes.
“In 2020 we expect to see the continued and increased adoption of Kubernetes for organizations to deploy services. The combination of its ease of use, depth of features, and integration with major cloud platforms will make it an increasingly appealing choice for developing and deploying software — even more so if your organization already deploys containerized software.”
— Josh Komoroske, Senior DevOps Engineer, StackRox
Beyond container orchestration, cloud technologies more broadly are shifting how governance and self-service are handled inside IT organizations. Heavy, manual governance models are giving way to lighter, automation-driven custodial approaches.
“Cloud technologies will continue to grow and a ‘DevOps first’ mindset will be baked into new developments. Heavy-handed governance models will turn to more of a custodial approach due to the amount of automation available in the cloud space. For example, IT will look to provide self-service options to support rapid provisioning of temporary resources for proof-of-concept work.”
— Tom Iverson, Managing Principal, Cloud and DevOps, RBA
Iverson also noted that commodity tools — office suites, low-code platforms, and ChatOps solutions — would increasingly serve as the interface for that self-service experience, bringing DevOps-style capabilities directly to teams where they already work.
What This Means Practically
- If your team hasn’t yet invested in Kubernetes, the ecosystem maturity and managed Kubernetes offerings from major cloud providers lower the barrier significantly.
- Self-service infrastructure provisioning — backed by guardrails rather than gatekeeping — reduces bottlenecks and accelerates experimentation.
- ChatOps integrations (e.g., triggering deployments or querying system status from a Slack channel) bring operations closer to the teams that need visibility.
Trend 2: IT Leaders Are Revisiting DevOps Success Metrics
Measurement has always been central to DevOps. Metrics like mean time to deploy (MTTD), deployment frequency, and change failure rate gave teams concrete ways to demonstrate improvement. But as DevOps matures, organizations are questioning whether those operational metrics tell the full story.
“We’ve learned that faster is not always better when it comes to software release cycles. As a result, we’re seeing organizations pivoting away from release cadences and emphasizing business value and customer satisfaction.”
— Justin Donato, VP of IT, Nintex
This shift represents an intersection between DevOps and broader digital transformation goals. The original pitch for DevOps — “we’ll ship faster and more frequently” — was a means to an end, not the end itself. Organizations are now asking the harder follow-up question: does shipping faster actually benefit the business?
Donato points to accelerated sales cycles and time-to-revenue as examples of concrete, business-level outcomes that DevOps can and should be measured against.
“Businesses today aren’t looking so much for fast releases as for quality releases. Competitors can spring up overnight, so it’s key to deliver capabilities that keep your customers satisfied and loyal; you don’t want them looking elsewhere.”
— Justin Donato, VP of IT, Nintex
Rethinking Your Metrics Dashboard
If your DevOps scorecard is still primarily composed of pipeline throughput metrics, consider adding or elevating:
- Customer satisfaction scores (CSAT/NPS) — Do releases actually improve the user experience?
- Time to revenue — How quickly does a shipped feature generate measurable business return?
- Change failure rate combined with user-reported defects — Speed means little if quality suffers.
- Feature adoption rates — Are users engaging with what you’re shipping?
The goal is not to replace operational metrics but to connect them to outcomes your executive team and customers actually care about.
Key Takeaways
DevOps is no longer a movement — it’s a baseline expectation in modern software organizations. The trends highlighted here reflect a broader maturation: teams are moving from “are we doing DevOps?” to “are we doing DevOps well, and does it matter to the business?”
- Cloud-native tools, particularly Kubernetes, are consolidating their position as core DevOps infrastructure.
- Self-service and automation are replacing manual governance as the primary IT control model.
- Business-value metrics are increasingly important alongside traditional operational measurements.
- Quality and customer satisfaction are competing with — and sometimes overtaking — release velocity as primary success indicators.
Whether your team is just beginning its DevOps journey or refining a well-established practice, these themes provide a useful frame for evaluating priorities and investments.