Originally published in November 2018, this article summarizes three predictions made by Tim Eusterman, Senior Director of Solutions Marketing at BMC Software, about the direction of DevOps in 2019 and beyond. The predictions were reported by TechRepublic and remain a useful lens for understanding how DevOps maturity has evolved.
The State of DevOps Heading Into 2019
By late 2018, DevOps had completed its journey from industry buzzword to a widely adopted software delivery methodology. Reports from the period cited dramatic performance differences between high-performing DevOps teams and lower-maturity organizations, with elite teams achieving significantly more frequent deployments and substantially faster lead times from code commit to production. Despite these demonstrated benefits, many enterprise teams still reported difficulty knowing where to begin or how to sustain their DevOps transformation, according to research from Puppet’s State of DevOps report series.
Against that backdrop, Eusterman outlined three shifts he expected to define DevOps in 2019.
Prediction 1: The “No-Ops” Concept Would Lose Its Appeal
For a period, the industry entertained the idea that development teams could absorb all operational responsibilities — effectively eliminating the need for a dedicated Ops function. Serverless computing and fully managed cloud platforms fueled this narrative, suggesting that infrastructure concerns could be abstracted away entirely.
Eusterman pushed back on this view heading into 2019:
“In 2019, Ops will reassert its role in the DevOps team with a reinvigorated focus on key values by baking governance, production orchestration, stability and scalability into the cake before it gets put into the oven. We suspect Dev will be delighted to have Ops back.”
Tim Eusterman, Senior Director of Solutions Marketing, BMC Software
This prediction has proven largely accurate. Governance, security, compliance, and reliability engineering have all become more prominent concerns as organizations scale their DevOps practices. Roles such as Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) and Platform Engineer have emerged to formalize the operational expertise that “no-Ops” advocates once hoped to eliminate. The consensus today is that Ops expertise is essential — it simply needs to be deeply integrated with the development workflow rather than siloed from it.
Prediction 2: Coding Automation Would Become the Norm
One of the persistent friction points in DevOps pipelines at the time was the Dev-to-Ops handoff into production. Even teams with solid CI/CD pipelines often relied on manual steps — approvals, configuration changes, environment setup — that created bottlenecks and introduced risk.
“2019 will be the year when adding jobs-as-code to the front end of the software delivery lifecycle will go mainstream. Taking this simple, powerful approach of coding automation instrumentation, along with the business logic and infrastructure-as-code, then running it all through the CI/CD toolchain, will help DevOps teams blow by the manual speed-bump into production.”
Tim Eusterman, Senior Director of Solutions Marketing, BMC Software
The concept Eusterman described — treating pipeline configuration, automation scripts, and orchestration logic as first-class code artifacts alongside application and infrastructure code — has since become standard practice. Tools such as GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and Tekton have made pipeline-as-code the default starting point for most new projects. Infrastructure-as-Code tools including Terraform and Pulumi have matured significantly, and the “everything-as-code” philosophy now underpins most modern platform engineering efforts.
Prediction 3: The DevOps Vendor Landscape Would Consolidate
In 2018, the DevOps toolchain landscape was fragmented. Dozens of vendors competed in every segment of the software delivery lifecycle — source control, CI/CD, artifact management, monitoring, incident management, and more. Eusterman predicted that this would rationalize quickly:
“The reason is simple: DevOps teams like choice, and as the tools mature they will know which ones they like. Winners also get the benefit of the ecosystem rallying behind their cause. And finally, enterprise architects get some well-deserved street cred when they say ‘governance matters.'”
Tim Eusterman, Senior Director of Solutions Marketing, BMC Software
The consolidation prediction has played out, though perhaps more slowly and unevenly than anticipated. Acquisitions — such as Microsoft’s purchase of GitHub and Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware — have reshaped the landscape. Integrated platforms like GitLab and GitHub have absorbed functionality that previously required separate tools. At the same time, the cloud-native ecosystem continues to generate new tooling, so consolidation and fragmentation have effectively been happening in parallel across different segments of the market.
What These Predictions Tell Us About DevOps Maturity
Looking back, these three predictions highlight a recurring theme in DevOps evolution: the movement toward greater formalization. The informal, experiment-driven DevOps culture of the early 2010s has progressively given way to structured practices around governance, automation standards, and platform consolidation. This is not a retreat from DevOps values — it is evidence that those values have become embedded deeply enough in engineering culture to justify investment in the tooling and organizational structures that sustain them at scale.
For teams still working through their own DevOps transformation, the core lessons from these predictions remain relevant: invest in Ops expertise rather than eliminating it, automate every repeatable step in your delivery pipeline, and be deliberate about the tools you standardize on.