Now that DevOps has entered its second decade, the focus has expanded beyond product delivery. It’s no longer just about dev and ops, but about removing the constraints between the business and its customers, with a focus on delivering not just new features and products, but also value. So what comes next as DevOps evolves?
Here are their predictions.
Culture and leadership
Business leaders will increasingly value DevOps, showing that the work of the DevOps enterprise community matters to the people who matter.
One of the most amazing dynamics within the DevOps enterprise community is seeing business leaders co-presenting success stories with their technology leadership counterparts. For example, Ken Kennedy (executive vice president and president for Technology and Product at CSG) and Kimberly Johnson (chief operating officer at Fannie Mae) described the achievements of their technology leadership counterparts and why it was important to them. I expect this trend to continue, especially given how COVID-19 has accelerated the rate of digital disruption. I believe this bodes well for all of technology.
— Gene Kim, author and founder of IT Revolution
Hybrid product teams will become a pillar of customer value delivery.
With the rise of hybrid (remote/in-office) product teams, upskilling and online training initiatives will expand. As the pressure continues to rise to sell products and services through e-commerce sites, apps, or SaaS solutions, the lines between product and engineering teams will rapidly blur, giving rise to cross-functional, multidisciplinary teams that must learn and grow together. Each member will need to develop a wider combination of process skills, soft skills, automation skills, functional knowledge, and business knowledge, while maintaining deep competency in their focus areas. Product and engineering teams will be measured on customer value delivered, rather than just features or products created.
—Jayne Groll, CEO of the DevOps Institute and author of the 2020 Upskilling Report
Corporate culture will transform as business leaders shift their focus to systems thinking, to drive strategic investments.
Business leaders faced the dilemma of knowing they need to improve time-to-market in order to remain competitive while on a limited budget. Millions of dollars have been spent on digital transformation, which (at best) has yielded local optimizations but not systemic business outcomes. This will drive a focus on applying systems thinking to first identify where and what types of investments will result in delivering desired business outcomes and then scaling these concepts across the organization.
—Carmen DeArdo, senior value stream management strategist, Tasktop Technologies
Security
CISOs will embrace DevSecOps methodologies.
Cloud-native security will rise higher on the agenda for CISOs as their organizations embrace Kubernetes, serverless, and other cloud-native technologies. It’s a significant cultural shift to embed security within DevOps practices, but it’s necessary: Businesses are moving to the cloud so they can deliver new features quickly and at high frequency, and security teams need to embrace new tools and processes to ensure that these deployments are safe as well as fast.
—Liz Rice, vice president, open-source engineering, Aqua Security
The acceleration of cloud adoption during the pandemic will shift the software security landscape dramatically.
While DevOps represents a clear evolution in the way that software is built, delivered, and operated, the architecture, composition, and very definition of applications will continue to change rapidly, leading to a rethink of software security approaches. These dual pressures of delivery velocity and cloud transformation will have a big impact on software security.
To get ahead of cloud transformation, software security will evolve into a risk-based vulnerability management service that seeks to automate and orchestrate security services as part of the software build-and-delivery pipeline. Security teams will arm developers with “point of capture” tools and coaching to eliminate vulnerabilities during development and provide policy guardrails for enabling speed. Throughout the pipeline, orchestrated security services will automatically reinforce the policy guardrails and enable risk-based vulnerability management for overburdened, under-resourced security teams that are challenged to get in front of cloud adoption. This will result in an increased demand for API security, cloud application security, application security orchestration services, and consolidated, risk-based vulnerability management approaches to software risk reduction.
—Jason Schmitt, general manager of the Synopsys Software Integrity Group
Analytics and automation
Predictive DevOps will be the next transformation that will deliver business value.
This is about using AIOps techniques across the delivery chain to be more efficient in delivering continuous value improvements for the business. To achieve true value, DevOps teams will pivot toward monitoring the business instead of monitoring the application or infrastructure. As a consequence, many dev and ops organizations will realize that they do not have the right skill set to understand what really matters to the business—and the concept of BizDevOps will be born. Business people will become part of the team that delivers digital instead of being a consumer of digital.
—Lars Rossen, chief technology officer, Micro Focus
Operations management
Microservice configuration management will become critical for tracking and deploying logical application versions and microservices across clusters.
Tracking the versions of microservices running across all clusters will become increasingly difficult as organizations embrace Kubernetes. In the process, those organizations will lose the concept of application versions and instead will need to track microservice relationships and configurations cluster by cluster.
To address the challenge, organizations will begin automating configuration management of microservices, versions, and the logical applications they create before deploying them to clusters. Those configuration insights will provide DevOps teams with the data they need to make informed decisions and the confidence to push microservices across dozens of clusters all day long. The bottom line: You will still need the ability to control what you release to your end users. Tracking the configurations and versions of services to application relationships will eliminate the risk and complexity of a microservice implementation.
—Tracy Ragan, CEO and co-founder, DeployHub
Development
Developers will have more say in the technology direction and data strategy of their companies.
Expect an aggressive “shift left” across all industries, where CIO’s will depend more on their development teams to guide the technical direction of the company. Historically, development teams have taken a top-down approach to move their data to the cloud, but, as with many things in the world, that changed with the pandemic and the subsequent reinforcement of cloud-based environments. In 2021, DevOps teams will continue to have far more say in the data strategy process, and as a result we’ll see a greater increase in the mobility of workloads, correlating with an increase in cloud data management techniques.
—Danny Allan, chief technology officer, Veeam
Value streams
DevOps will expand from product delivery to value delivery.
DevOps will expand beyond product delivery to business value delivery and value stream delivery, enabling a broader digital transformation. This requires taking an outside-in view from the business outcomes back into the people, processes, and technologies required to power them. We will see tighter collaboration between business stakeholders and delivery teams, aligning goals and measuring the right business KPIs such as customer satisfaction, usage, and transaction rates, followed by continuous adaptations in processes and technologies to improve them.
—Yaniv Sayers, senior director and chief technologist, Micro Focus
Source: https://techbeacon.com/devops/future-devops-21-predictions-2021
Synergetics India 