2019 was an exciting year for DevOps practitioners, with DevOps adoption continuing to grow at a fast pace. Most organizations were either executing or evaluating their DevOps strategies. So, what is 2020 going to bring in DevOps, infrastructure and application automation? Here are seven DevOps predictions for emerging trends in the new year.
Customer Experience
CX will become the guiding light of the DevOps journey, and not necessarily just technology. This is a big mindset shift from the early days of pure-technologist enthusiasm. As DevOps matures, we have to remind ourselves that it’s all about making business faster, not just the cool tech.
Take advantage now:
- Tie DevOps achievements to business needs and results to get executive buy-in and budgets.
- Successful QA teams will start looking at their role as guardians of customer experience and not just testers.
Trust
Everyone will be talking about trust—not only in the context of zero trust networks but also in the context of making it possible for Dev and Ops to trust one another as the foundation for DevOps.
Take advantage now:
- Proactively invest in creating a culture of trust. Identify causes for lack of trust in your value stream and make trust a 2020 goal.
- Encourage product-level conversation and define methodology and ownership when it comes to value stream management, application, and infrastructure automation. It is the foundation that everyone is working on.
- Invest in staging environments—Staging environments are needed to ensure things work before you put them in production. For many of us, jumping directly to automatically deploying to production is a big step. The risk can be mitigated by investing in staging environment automation, which will be the first step toward deployment to production.
Value Stream
The DevOps toolchain is going away. In 2020 we will think the value stream. The industry is maturing beyond the notion of chaining together dozens of open source tools and trying to make it work together. In previous years many felt comfortable saying that if they have a CI system in place it means they “do DevOps.” This is no longer the case. DevOps is not just CI, and DevOps cannot be established in silos. Mature DevOps needs to take into consideration the entire value stream—from planning a new capability and the business requirement, all the way to the customer getting more value and a wonderful experience.
In 2019, Gartner announced it’s the last year of the ARO MQ, as it’s not the right perspective. In 2020 we finally gain a system-level view on the value stream. More players are announcing end-to-end value stream management including Atlassian’s new Forge platform, GitLab, and CloudBees. Companies are maturing and adopting system-level solutions.
Take advantage now:
- Plan for platform operations. A system-level value stream perspective requires roles that take ownership of orchestration and automation throughout the value stream and not just in silos.
The SRE Role Will Continue to Mature
The SRE role that started with Google bringing software development practices into Operations will continue to evolve. Increasing volume, velocity, and variety of data will make AIOps solutions thrive. Also, increasing levels of automation will require smart ways to handle dynamic infrastructure and applications without losing control, and being able to track changes all the way back to the coder.
Take advantage now:
- If you haven’t implemented the SRE role yet, consider how SREs can be part of your teams in 2020. Define SRE areas of responsibility and KPIs, and how the SREs communicate with the teams. Is it a centralized position or are the SREs part of the team?
- Make sure you provide SREs with the tools they need to succeed including:
- What are the observability solutions you use? Who uses them today? How do you analyze it and how is it communicated?
- What are the production environment orchestration, deployment and configuration tools that you use today? How do you connect them to application and infrastructure automation that happens before production?
Seamless Infrastructure
We will have to make infrastructure seamless for our teams. Internal customers are also customers, and their experiences will be just as important. Self-service and empowering teams will be the main themes in the bridges that need to be built between Dev and ITOps. Public cloud, Kubernetes and serverless technologies will grow. And while it makes automation more feasible than ever, the emphasis will shift to self-service and to the end users. With more companies adopting similar approaches, the need to develop internal expertise will decrease, and we will see more off-the-shelf solutions.
Take advantage now:
- Map how infrastructure is used throughout your value stream, and work on unifying the approach in product-level.
- Make sure you build self-service solutions with strong focus on the end-user in order to enable and balance both speed and control. Make sure developers and ITOps are equally represented when determining an approach to infrastructure automation.
Infrastructure Automation
Infrastructure automation is going to get smarter, with a lot of AI and ML. Making sure automation is properly governed will also increasingly be important. Take into consideration security and compliance, as well as cost.
Take advantage now:
- Assess infrastructure automation practices throughout your value stream. Who builds the automation? What teams and systems consume it? How do you enforce security best practices (e.g. no passwords in public repositories, using proper data sets for testing, compliance of automation blueprints)? How do you enforce cost control (e.g. tagging, reviewing cloud spend reports)?
- Invest in control mechanisms before you lose control, especially in public cloud automation. If you don’t have governance in place, look at baking governance into automation, rather than adopting traditional cloud management approaches. Invest in automatic de-commissioning of infrastructure, automatic tagging, analysis of infrastructure consumption data and connecting it back to the business requirement, secrets and key management and access control.
SaaS
Open source is nice. SaaS is great. While big open source projects set the pace (K8S, Github) and are strongly backed up and funded by the industry’s giants, smaller projects are increasingly difficult to scale and glue together, especially when trying to assure enterprise readiness. The need to “do it yourself” is gradually fading, as more vendors offer products and services for supporting DevOps with clear business and support models and, as important, with OOB integrations with the ecosystem. Just Rest API is no longer enough.
Take advantage now:
- If your enterprise-readiness requirements make it difficult for you to scale DevOps initiatives, consider evaluating new SaaS offerings that eliminate much of the heavy-lifting and gluing that were typical to the skills-heavy early-days implementations. If you were concerned with security, cost and skill requirement, today you can find tools that are purpose-built to support DevOps for enterprise at scale. The good news is that most of the vendors are well-aware of the criticality of integrating to your ecosystem, making it easier to achieve your end-to-end value stream vision.
Disclaimer- This article was originally published on www.devops.com
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