At the end of 2017, we got in touch with those who live an breathe DevOps—DevOps engineers, evangelists and leads—to get their insights about the DevOps trends most likely to develop in 2018 and beyond.
We’ve collected their insights and organized them by topic for your reading pleasure. Here’s how it breaks down:
Enterprise Adoption of DevOps
DevOps becomes the norm, from day one
“Mature global customers I work with have shifted from ‘should we try DevOps’ to ‘every feature team should have at least one DevOps expert!’ While this mindset still isn’t perfect, it shows major change and demonstrates how software engineering is improving. Over the next 2-3 years, I expect my customers to run projects with questions like ‘should we plan 10 or 20 percent of capacity for continuous improvement?’ instead of ‘should we do automated testing?’“
—Uldis Karlovs-Karlovskis, Nordics DevOps Lead @ Accenture
Bigger companies are struggling to adopt new norms
“There are some big companies out there, making billions in annual revenue, that haven’t adopted DevOps practices. More and more such companies, which have ‘old ops’ views on application development/delivery, are starting to look in the direction of adopting DevOps practices. Even if company leads and management understand that trend, it’s going to take a lot of resources, energy, and time to convince their old-fashioned colleagues to implement… Big ships are harder and slower to steer in the right direction.”
—Dmitry Mihailov, DevOps Engineer @ Accenture
DevOps is only just beginning to be understood
“In the past years, we’ve just scratched the surface of the DevOps world, we’ve just started learning and moulding new tools. In 2018, the word ‘DevOps’ will carry much more weight and it will be a very important piece of the technological industry, showing its effectiveness and the true power of combining development and operations.”
—Jalil Bonilla Gasca, DevOps Team Lead @ IBM
Achieving DevOps success will require a mindset shift
“In order to be truly successful at DevOps in 2018, one must be open minded to a new culture that stimulates people to get better constantly by providing meaningful learning moments and challenging opportunities where failing fast is accepted. This culture should be promoted at all levels within an organization. Only then true success can be achieved.”
—Kim Uyttebrouck, DevOps Engineer @ IBM
DevOps foundations a key part of enterprise success roadmap
“As digital transformation becomes a key success factor for many organizations, it’s imperative that they have a strong foundation of DevOps built into the roadmap for this journey. Faster delivery of IT services ties into top priority initiatives for 2018, and more organizations are now breathing DOpAir (DevOps Air). I’m seeing C-level execs increasingly ask for strategic initiatives to transform their delivery pipelines to support their digital strategy, which is a testament to DevOps winds in motion.“
—Fawwaz Sayed, MEA DevOps Practice Leader @ IBM
The year of agility
“2018 will be the year where the real value of being Agile becomes mainstream. There is a growing realization that in order to amplify responsiveness, operational resilience, and faster time-to-market throughout the software delivery lifecycle, you need to synergistically/holistically connect development with IT operations (mainly through the introduction of automation).”
—Russell Pannone, Senior Business Consultant/Agile-DevOps Guide @ Tata Consultancy Services
Automation is the name of the game
“In DevOps, there’s a lot of talk about automation of deployment, testing, release, monitoring and feedback. If made possible, zero-touch automation is what the future is going to be. Application of automation in all stages is the key and this is the main goal to strive for in 2018.”
—Jayaprakash Jayabalan, DevOps Advisory Consultant @ IBM
Methods will continue to improve
“The DevOps movement will continue to improve. Many companies will embrace DevOps and agile development as their mainstream methodologies. For those who are already using DevOps, they will continue to improve their methods and try to standardize simpler CI/CD pipelines and tools.”
—Noor Fairoza, DevOps Engineer @ IBM
The DevOps momentum — bigger than Agile
“I see substantial change in how people perceive the concept of DevOps and how it can change how they develop and maintain systems. What I hear from my customers is that we are in the midst of the DevOps momentum, and it will be much more significant than Agile concept was alone, now it is about a complete game-changer.”
—Bartosz Chrabski, World Wide Hybrid Cloud Competitive Sales Team – DevOps and BlueMix Leader @ IBM
Testing: The Next Frontier
The dawning of DevTestOps
“We have done alot of Dev as we as Ops, but where are we heading from the testing perspective? There has been a lot of development of automated testing framework, but hasn’t had the same importance as Dev and Ops have. DevTestOps might be the biggest shift in the DevOps community in 2018.“
—Hemanth Babu, Senior Software Engineer @ Visa
Testing at the core of DevOps
“From 2018 onwards, more and more enterprises shift left with hypothesis testing, dark launch, canary and experimental flags to predict users. The rise of false information—in the form of crawlers, Bots, AI and machine learning algorithms—will require organizations to be cautious and daring at the same time; QA folks will become pioneers, rather than gatekeepers.”
—Aditya Chourasiya, DevOps Technical QA Lead @ Tata Consultancy Services
Security
Security will become central earlier in the process
“The current trend is towards imbibing security and infrastructure considerations earlier down the timeline into coding, architecture, and pre-production systems. Moving forward, DevSecOps and DevNetOps would be forthcoming DevOps trends to watch in 2018.”
—Abhishek Roy, DevOps Engineer @ Accenture
Cyberattacks will force a shift in DevOps focus
“DevOps as corporate culture is still in its maturing phase, while cyberattacks are increasing and we are seeing a move to much more subtle, stealthy threats, security practices across all phases of SDLC will rapidly grow.”
—Oren Ashkenazy, DevOps Expert @ CyberArk
Security automation is next
“When companies started to implement DevOps, they started with Deployment automation in low-risk level environments, then they moved to CI practices; after that, full CI/CD was the goal. Last year the topic was testing automation. I think this year organizations are going to start moving into UAT testing and security automation.”
—Guillermo Martinez, Technology Architect Consultant @ Accenture
Secure deployments are key
“In 2018, we will talk a lot about DevSecOps. A new focus on security for DevOps programs that ensures full, secure development projects for professional customers.
The question about security in the digital world is very important, and we must be ready to ensure full, secure deployments for tomorrow’s projects and new technology models like IOT, AI database storage, and webapp.”
—Slim Triki, Platform Engineer – DevOps @ AXA
DevOps Trends and Organizational Shifts
The demands are changing for IT skills
“The remarkable increase in demand for DevOps expertise has led to the reshaping and broadening of the profile and skill set of the modern IT professional, now spanning an ever-growing set of diverse sub-specializations. It is clear to me that both these DevOps trends will accelerate over the upcoming years.”
—Salvador Verde Rodríguez, Sr. DevOps Engineer @ Accenture Germany
The dawning of the Delivery Trinity
“In 2018, we will see the meteoric rise of the ‘Delivery Trinity’. This dream team will consist of 3 primary roles, the ‘Anchor Developer’, the ‘Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)’ and the ‘End User’ (with Product Owner, as proxy).
With the End User/Product Owner driving the feature content, the Anchor Developer implementing, testing, deploying, and the SRE relentlessly ensuring the deployed features exploit the operational environment to ensure service characteristics meet End User expectations. All other squad members (designers, testers, analysts, architects) will decorate that core team of 3.”
—Andrea Crawford, DevOps & Cloud Native Development @ IBM
Startups will adopt DevOps from the get-go
“Based on my last years’ experience working closely with different customers from startups to big enterprises, I think that 2018 will see the DevOps methodology widely adopted by startups. Actually, startups, which do not follow DevOps practices, will not succeed as expected or they just fail.”
—Victor Varza, DevOps Engineer @ IBM
New Technologies and Tools
Increasing efficiency and productivity
“2018 will be the year of continuing progress of DevOps tooling such as the likes of Kubernetes, the cloud native space, and serverless technology and ideals; bringing greater advances to points of usability and usefulness within the DevOps space.”
—Lee Clench, DevOps Engineer @ Capgemini
Improvements throughout the pipeline
“2018 will see more utilization of available DevOps tools, reducing the re-work process or resulting in zero rework. I’d like to see a customizable tool for creating a trend in % format from continuous feedback metrics, which can be published across the team to identify critical check points. This will assist in improving tracking, archiving trends of all releases and thus improving the quality of a product. I also expect we’ll see a more stable Docker swarm.”
—Albert Sebastian, Sr. Analyst , DevOps @ Accenture
New buzzwords in the field
“PaaS and SaaS will become keywords for the DevOps world, even more so than they have been until now.
Docker and Docker-like structures will dominate the markets, as long as microservices are easier to configure and develop on.”
—Flavio D’Uffizi, DevOps Engineer and Systems Administrator @ Sourcesense
Microservices, containers, and the DevOps between them
“Microservices are currently the hottest topic in software development, and many companies embraced the microservices approach when developing their product.
A change in thinking is needed when it comes to adopting best practices for developing a workflow to fit to microservices and all of its aspects.
In order to adopt the microservices approach, it isn’t enough for developers to step forward and take action into this transition; DevOps teams will also need to change their approach and state of mind and will need to equip themselves with the right technologies, tools, techniques, and processes for the whole product success.”
—Shahar Rajuan, DevOps Leader @ mPrest
Containers and containers and containers. Oh my!
“I feel containerization is very hot trend in the current market and also organizations moving to Hybrid cloud instead of relying on one public cloud is one of the trends I’m recently looking at these days.”
—Avinash Reddy, DevOps/Site Reliability Engineer (AWS) @ Tata Consultancy Services
The cloud and open source lead the way
“It seems that the mainstream is currently trending to open source technology and there is a great migration to the cloud, off loading the whole need of it makes it easy and reachable. Many security matters will arise, yet the flexibility is very welcome.”
—Ilya Gurenko, CM/DevOps @ Varonis
Measurement tools and higher adoption rates
“In 2018 we will see an increased focus on using data to analyse the results of DevOps. We might even see vendors move into the DevOps dashboarding space. Early in the year, Forsgren and Humble will be publishing a book called “Accelerate”, discussing measurements in DevOps.
I also expect more organizations to adopt the cloud vendor native products like Amazon’s DevOps pipeline tools, and a further consolidation of vendors on the one side, with new tools becoming prominent on the other side. “
— Micro Hering, APAC Agile & DevOps lead @ Accenture
What are your predictions and insights for 2018? Comment below to take part in the discussion!
