This article is based on industry perspectives originally published in late 2018. Quotes and predictions are attributed to named practitioners from that period. The original source article appeared on computerworlduk.com.
By the close of 2018, DevOps had moved well beyond a niche engineering philosophy. With continuous delivery pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and cross-functional teams becoming standard in forward-looking organisations, the question heading into 2019 was less “should we adopt DevOps?” and more “how do we scale it, secure it, and sustain it?”
Here is what prominent practitioners and executives were predicting for the year ahead, covering cloud-native consolidation, tooling maturity, containers and Kubernetes, and the growing importance of DevSecOps.
Cloud-Native Consolidation
Major acquisitions in the open-source ecosystem — IBM acquiring Red Hat, VMware acquiring Heptio, and Microsoft acquiring GitHub — signalled a broader consolidation trend in the cloud-native market. Abby Kearns, then Executive Director of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, described the landscape as “big, fragmented and frothy” but expected it to mature rapidly.
“As the market and the technology mature, we’ll see alignment around a key technology. The leaders in the ecosystem will prevail, either through significant exits or acquisitions by incumbent technology companies. The rest of the market solidifies around the prevailing solutions, and it moves at scale.”
Abby Kearns, Executive Director, Cloud Foundry Foundation
Nigel Kersten, VP of Ecosystem Engineering at Puppet, pointed to Microsoft’s GitHub acquisition as particularly significant, predicting it would help Microsoft build lasting credibility in open source — and that its long-term results would “stand in stark contrast to the IBM/Red Hat one in terms of results and longevity”.
Death to DevOps, Long Live DevOps?
One of the more provocative predictions for 2019 was that “DevOps is dead” narratives would gain traction in the press — not because the practices were disappearing, but because they were becoming so normalised as to no longer be remarkable.
“The real remaining work will continue to be enterprises working out how to scale devops from small teams to huge organisations, and many pundits will misread the situation and declare that devops is dead in 2019.”
Nigel Kersten, VP of Ecosystem Engineering, Puppet
Mark Madden, Digital Transformation Director of Emerging Technologies at CGI UK, expected 2019 to bring a broader wave of enterprise adoption, particularly in traditionally conservative industries:
“In 2019, people’s reaction to the devops approach will continue to change at pace, moving from curiosity through to acceptance. Already, a few leading organisations across the utilities, public sector, and financial services industries who were at the vanguard of devops adoption have spoken of the cost savings and increased productivity through the automation derived from devops.”
Mark Madden, CGI UK
The implication was clear: DevOps was not dying — it was graduating from an avant-garde movement to standard operational practice. The challenge for 2019 and beyond would be scaling DevOps culture across large, complex organisations, not just small agile teams.
Tooling: Microservices Disillusionment and Emerging Technologies
Edson Yanaga, Director of Developer Experience at Red Hat, predicted that microservices would be “entering the trough of disillusionment” — borrowing Gartner’s Hype Cycle terminology — as more organisations began sharing stories of failed or over-engineered microservices implementations.
“We’ll realise that microservices is not a silver bullet — nothing is — but it’s very useful in some particular situations.”
Edson Yanaga, Red Hat
Yanaga also predicted a shift in architectural preferences:
- Message-driven architectures would be recognised as a better fit for most enterprise use cases than HTTP/REST APIs.
- Apache Kafka would continue to grow in adoption as an event-streaming backbone.
- Istio, the service mesh co-launched by Google and IBM, would gain traction — though managing its configuration on distributed architectures would remain a challenge, likely handled through separate deployment pipelines and Git repositories.
Kunal Agarwal, CEO of Unravel Data, agreed on Kafka’s continued rise alongside Apache Spark, and added that TensorFlow and H2O were positioned to be breakout technologies for DevOps teams working with data and machine learning pipelines in 2019.
Containers and Kubernetes: Promise vs. Complexity
Containers were already a dominant theme in DevOps tooling by 2018, but predictions for 2019 focused on closing the gap between the promise of containers and the practical difficulty of working with them day-to-day.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) had acknowledged that Kubernetes presented a significant complexity barrier for developers, and that community-led efforts to simplify the container orchestration system would be necessary. Docker’s enterprise pitch centred on abstracting that complexity behind a friendlier interface.
Yanaga expected incremental but meaningful improvements to the container developer experience in 2019:
“Areas like debugging, packaging, code editors and others are still years behind the non-container ones. We won’t reach maturity in the next year, but I expect things to improve around the container development experience.”
Edson Yanaga, Red Hat
He also noted that 2018 had seen a proliferation of Kubernetes-based Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platforms, and predicted that 2019 would bring standardisation efforts around the FaaS programming model on top of Kubernetes — potentially driven by the CNCF or the Eclipse Foundation — leading to longer-term platform consolidation.
Chris Griggs, VP and GM for EMEA at SkyTap, framed containers as a cultural challenge as much as a technical one:
“There will be a widespread acknowledgement that you cannot master containers without first fully embracing the cultural shift toward shared responsibility for delivering great software. As such, many more IT teams will actively encourage developers to take more responsibility for their code working in the real world, and operations to take part in this evolution by treating their infrastructure as code.”
Chris Griggs, SkyTap
DevSecOps: Embedding Security Into the Pipeline
Security remained one of the most pressing concerns for DevOps teams heading into 2019. As developer and operations roles merged, the expectation was that security practices would need to be baked into the team’s culture and toolchain — not bolted on at the end of the release cycle.
Gary McGraw, VP of Security Technology at Synopsys, highlighted a critical gap: while automated tools for code-level security analysis and application-level penetration testing had matured over many years, the same could not be said for architectural risk analysis and threat modelling.
“The lack of automation for architectural risk analysis will mean that in many cases it is conveniently left out — oops, we’ll just sweep that under the rug. This is becoming a more tangible problem as devops adoption progresses.”
Gary McGraw, Synopsys
CGI’s Mark Madden called for greater collaboration between security and DevOps practitioners, and made the case for DevSecOps as an operational standard:
“With devsecops embedded correctly, this can help speed up and add process-optimised security into the CI/CD position for releases. It also helps to mitigate threats caused by the number of security flaws within the development application cycle, as these can be identified and attacked as necessary, rather than at the end as an afterthought.”
Mark Madden, CGI UK
The consensus across practitioners was that automating security checks earlier in the pipeline — at the code commit, build, and integration stages — was achievable and necessary, but that fully automating design-level threat analysis remained an unsolved problem.
Key Takeaways
- Market consolidation in the cloud-native space was accelerating, driven by major acquisitions including IBM–Red Hat, VMware–Heptio, and Microsoft–GitHub.
- DevOps “death” headlines were expected to reflect maturity and normalisation, not decline. The real challenge was scaling DevOps practices across large enterprises.
- Microservices disillusionment was anticipated as organisations confronted the real-world complexity of distributed architectures.
- Kafka, Istio, TensorFlow, and H2O were identified as technologies to watch in 2019 DevOps toolchains.
- Kubernetes complexity remained a barrier, with community effort needed to improve the developer experience.
- DevSecOps — embedding security throughout the CI/CD pipeline — was becoming a mainstream expectation, though automated threat modelling remained a gap.