2020 Trends across the industry related to DevOps

DevOps is a culture that encourages collaborations among all stakeholders including development and operations teams and the improvement of processes through automation to increase the quality and speed of software delivery.

Remember this definition of DevOps and be able to repeat it when asked: “What is DevOps?” The goal is to create a working environment in which building, testing and deploying software can occur quickly, reliably and frequently.

By doing this, a company can achieve its goals faster and deploy new features, security patches, and bug fixes. The most recent trends across the industry related to DevOps are as follows:

1.End-to-end lifecycle management to streamline DevOps workflows

2.Changing the definition of an “application”

3.Moving fast without breaking things

4.Optimizing the DevOps toolchain

5.Closing the developer skill gap

6.DevSecOps is reality

7.Container-first strategy fully adopted

End-to-End Streamlined DevOps Workflows

There are so many different DevOps tools and so many integrations to other tools that need to be made in order to put together a full CI/CD Pipeline.

The focus on using something that is best-of-breed for one small section of a complete pipeline has been commonplace. While organizations have reaped the benefits of catering to customized workflows, this has also led to incredible tool sprawl within often dispersed teams that can hinder productivity.

DevOps vendors are often tasked with ensuring compatibility with tools from other vendors. The number of tools will continue to increase, but there will be a movement toward end-to-end lifecycle management and single applications that streamline tooling and workflows to ultimately improve software development speed and agility.

Take a look at Gitlab’s value proposition as a complete DevOps solution to understand how this is playing out.

What Exactly is an Application?

Many organizations are struggling to adopt cloud because their current systems and processes simply don’t map to such a dynamic environment.

When I can provision and destroy servers many times per minute, how do I keep this in sync with my CMDB and change control systems?

Think about how many AWS services there are available now! Would you consider each of those an application?

When developing microservice, is each function an application? Or is the application the whole thing put together working in a UI?

Move fast and don’t break my app!

“Move fast and breaks things.”

This ideology has never worked in financial services, we’re seeing that it is having continued negative repercussions for big tech. With privacy and regulation becoming a top concern for consumers, more companies will be pumping the brakes before launching into new business plans. With behavioral, technological and industrial shifts happening constantly all around us, releases will need to be much more stable.

As the industry has matured, we’ve got a lot better about managing state in our environments and building-in self-awareness to apps so they know if they can start taking live traffic or not.

Optimized Toolchains

DevOps tools in the market are maturing. They have more and more features built into one product that used to take integrating several together for the same effect. It is expensive to run multiple different COTS tools for a complete CI/CD pipeline. It also makes it harder to tune and optimize each tool if resources are constantly integrating several just for basic functionality.

Look to see how you can reduce the tool sprawl and maintain the same functionality even if there isn’t 100% like-for-like feature sets. They most likely will be coming in a future version of the tool or product.

The Skill Gap Tightens

Developers have traditionally been very against learning “deployments” or configuring middleware. With automation tools becoming very much like 3rd party libraries, developers are getting involved sooner and in some cases leading the way in deployment automation.

In addition, as operations folks learn more and more about how to write code, they will soon be able to contribute to core application development.

DevSecOps — Not Just Another Buzzword

Security is getting easier and organizations expect security validation prior to code releases. ISO’s no longer are accepting manual reviews every 12 months to check if the security policy is being followed. Integrating source-code secrets scanning, dependency vulnerability checks, and open source license legal reviews is more and more commonplace.

Container First

We’ve finally turned the page on installing software on “slave” nodes to do CI builds. Tools and technologies, we need to run during CI are now containerized.

This enables us to use more and different types of technology depending on the job we need to do.

This also opens another can of worms with the need for container scanning tool such as AquaSec