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DevOps is the popular technology of software development sought by the IT community globally. And now, rather than just being about dev and ops, it is expected to add more value in delivering new features and products and taking away limitations between a business and its customers.
Many companies plan to put in place best practices around their digital transformation with DevOps. Many tech leaders have expressed their opinions about the advancement of DevOps in the coming year, and the following trends have been compiled considering those opinions. So, let’s delve into the top 15 DevOps trends to watch for in 2021.
1. Necessity of Migration to Microservices: It will become quite essential for organizations to migrate from vast to microservices and containerized architecture to be successful in their digital transformation journey. It will become less a choice and more an obligation from this point on. Hence, the implementation of Kubernetes will grow. Also, the adoption of multi-cloud Terraform will be the definitive choice for automation of infrastructure for companies.
2. Security Will Be More Important: The worth of security has increased more, with the COVID-19 pandemic being one of the most evident reasons for this increase, and it will be a very crucial element in the natural software development process, including testing and implementation. DevOps is supportive in setting up security procedures, infrastructure, and policies, and, hence, businesses should apply it while developing security protocols. Security should observe more of a contribution from DevOps while DevOps should embrace growing security aspects in its implementation.
3. Multiple Facets of Hybrid Acceptance: The rise of a hybrid workforce (remote and onsite) will demand up-skilling and online training initiatives. To thrive in such a situation, it is vital that cross-functional and multi-disciplinary teams become skilled together. It will be necessary to broaden the combination of soft skills, process skills, automation skills, business knowledge, and functional knowledge for every member with deep proficiency in their focus areas.
4. Take Up DevSecOps Methodologies: CISOs will embrace cloud-native security with serverless, Kubernetes, and other cloud-native technologies. Embedding security within DevOps practices is very necessary for businesses to deliver new features quickly and at a high frequency while moving to the cloud. Also, security teams should grab new tools and processes for safer and fast deployments.
5. Increased Need for DataOps: Utilization of digital content is increasing fast, and, hence, a new level of automation for self-scaling and self-healing systems is crucial. DevOps should step up and make use of available data and metrics to bring about valuable insights, build up an automation that learns for itself from the data, apply machine learning models to predict incidents, and predict the capacity to perk up budget planning.
6. Serverless Computing Technology on the Rise: Serverless architecture is gaining significance amongst the DevOps community, as servers are not required to be provisioned and managed like a traditional hosting service. The technology leaders in this field include Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, and they provide enhanced scalability, deployment, productivity, and user experience with nominal cost.
7. Speeding Up Development with GitOps: GitOps is about how DevOps uses developing tools to drive operations. This operating model helps build cloud-native applications that bring together monitoring, deployment, and management and act as a true source for declarative infrastructure and applications. By using different tools, it can alert you to any discrepancies. With the continuous delivery offered by GitOps, your team can make safe and secure updates to complex applications running in Kubernetes
8. Appearance of NoOps: More managed services will come into view to ease DevOps operations and reduce operating expenses (OPEX) in customers. This will lead to more serverless apps, serverless static websites, and more serverless services like Aurora Serverless, Amazon S3, and Fargate.
9. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Gets More Effective: Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a core principle of DevOps in the cloud. Here, networks, servers, and storage devices on-premises or in the cloud are defined as code. This allows organizations to automate and make their infrastructure simple. Even reversing the process to the “last configuration that worked” is also possible with IaC. This helps in a disastrous failure, and, hence, rapid recovery and reduced downtime can be achieved.
10. Emergence of BizDevOps: Cost optimization in terms of architectures and corporate hierarchies will be derived from the value of DevOps. Cloud-native, flexible tooling and architectures will be reserved for smaller organizations, too, like the big guys, e.g., Hazelcast or Snowflake vs. Oracle/Teradata. FaaS is also getting started (serverless, Lambda, etc.)
11. Chaos Engineering and Automation Gaining More Significance: When development, deployment, testing, infrastructure, and release are all automated, a single line of moving to production with crucial quality gates is achieved. Repeatable, fast, customizable, and dependable automation leads to the success of any project. In chaos engineering, system behavior and customer experience are closely coupled, which helps to give a better customer experience.
12. Even Out Cloud-Native Approaches: Cloud space has become truly advanced, and containerization is the norm now. Everything is standardized as that of the mainframe era, and it is indeed a golden age for software development. DevOps and cloud-native tools together have achieved a lot of goals. Pipelines, storage, hosting, and load balancing — the whole thing is resolved in just five minutes these days.
13. DevOps on the Path of BADgile: Whenteams are misguidedly “doing agile” instead of “being agile,” then it leads to “BADgile.” Extra-focus on automation tools causes missed requirements, causing more defects in production. Thriving DevOps teams will advance their end-to-end processes to include robust automated and manual testing to authenticate quality standards and security requirements and the isolation of functions across workflows.
14. DevSecOps as an Integral Part of DevOps: The “Sec” part of DevSecOps will be more and more essential in the software development lifecycle, and a real security “shift left” will be the new norm. With fewer dedicated security steps in the CI/CD pipelines, security automatic awareness and actions will be a major element of all pipeline steps. These include the developer’s IDE, dependency, and static code analysis. A software component is only released after the proper intervention of these issues, and customers are given security issue-free software.
15. Using Service Mesh for DevOps: Service mesh is an integrated app infrastructure layer in the DevOps environment that shares data within services and solves many functions. It contains various activities such as load balancing, encryption, authorization, and authentication. This allows teams to do their assigned task while saving time and energy that otherwise may get spent on bulky administrative activities.
DevOps will put forth many more innovative trends and offerings in 2021. Companies employing DevOps and its recent trends will surely improve their capability to create effective and robust software solutions.