With about 77% of organizations already relying on DevOps to deploy software updates, the future of DevOps is increasingly becoming synonymous with the future of the business landscape. In fact, some studies show that the adoption of DevOps is so rapid that its market value has already surpassed the $10 billion mark.
In this article, we’ll outline some of the trends, technologies, and tools that will shape the future of DevOps and offer tips on how your Canadian or American business can leverage them to your advantage. First, let’s recap the basics of DevOps engineering. For a more detailed explanation, check out our previous Does Your Business Really Need DevOps Engineers? Article.
Recap: What Exactly Is DevOps?
In the ever-evolving landscape of software development, DevOps has emerged as a pivotal methodology bridging the gap between software development and operations teams. Since its inception in the early 2000s, it has significantly revolutionized how organizations plan, manage, and execute software development and deployment processes.
Unlike in the past, where development and operations teams worked separately in silos, DevOps creates a unified environment for both units to collaborate in real-time and release more frequent iterative updates instead of periodic large-scale development of huge bodies of codes. This has lead to faster turnaround times and a ton of other benefits, including:
- Increased collaboration and better communication
- More accuracy and less manual errors
- Consistency across development environments
- Faster bug identification and resolution
Key Milestones in the Evolution of DevOps
Before delving into what the future holds for DevOps engineering, let’s have a brief look at its evolution thus far:
- The Inception of the DevOps Movement (2009)
While the practical application of DevOps principles in software production processes can be traced to as early as the 2000s, it was not until around 2009 that the concept was formally recognized as DevOps. This happened in the now famous “DevOpsDays” conference held in Ghent. This event brought together software developers, operations professionals, and thought leaders to discuss the challenges of traditional software development practices and explore new approaches to collaboration and automation. Here, luminaries like Patrick Debois and Andrew Clay Shafer laid the groundwork for a cultural shift in software development practices.
- Publication of “The Phoenix Project” (2013)
The subsequent years saw a proliferation of DevOps practices and tools aimed at fostering collaboration, automation, and faster delivery cycles. In 2013, Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford published “The Phoenix Project,” a seminal work that popularized DevOps principles through a narrative format. This book presented DevOps principles and practices through a fictional narrative set in a large enterprise IT organization. It emphasized the importance of breaking down organizational silos, automating repetitive tasks, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement. As the first book to be published on this concept, it became a seminal work in the DevOps community, popularizing concepts like the Three Ways (flow, feedback, and continuous learning) and highlighting the importance of culture, automation, and measurement in DevOps transformations.
- The Rise of Cloud Computing
By the mid-2010s, DevOps had become mainstream, with organizations across industries adopting its principles to stay competitive in the digital age. The rise of cloud computing further accelerated its adoption, enabling organizations to leverage scalable infrastructure and automation tools for rapid deployment and scaling — facilitating more efficient applications building and deployment. DevOps practices and tools also emerged as essential components for managing cloud-native architectures and optimizing resource utilization.
- The Emergence of Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) emerged as a crucial foundational concept in DevOps, facilitating the automation and management of IT infrastructure through code. It allowed teams to define, provision, and manage infrastructure resources using declarative or imperative code, enhancing scalability, consistency, and efficiency in software delivery pipelines. By shifting infrastructure management from manual processes to code-based automation, IaC enabled seamless reproducibility across environments. This shift towards programmable infrastructure also increased agility and consistency in deploying and managing IT environments.
Now, Let’s Look at the Top 6 Trends That Will Shape the Future of DevOps
From automation to AI-driven insights, here’s a comprehensive look at the top future DevOps trends shaping the software development industry:
#1: Increased AI and ML Integration Into DevOps
AIOps, the increasingly growing trend of using AI capabilities like natural language processing and machine learning models to streamline DevOps workflows, will undoubtedly gain more traction in the coming years. Research shows that as more developers discover the AIOps market will record a steady CAGR of 37.90% and clock over 644.94 billion by 2030.
And reasonably so — AI-powered tools can analyze vast amounts of data generated throughout the DevOps pipeline, offering valuable insights into performance bottlenecks, code quality issues, and predictive analytics for potential failures. By leveraging them, DevOps engineers can automate routine tasks, optimize resource allocation, and enhance decision-making processes, ultimately accelerating software delivery and improving overall system reliability.
With AI and ML tools at the heart of DevOps, we’ll also see more organizations taking a keen interest in data quality. The conversation will gradually shift from not just collecting as much data as you can, but also ensuring that the data is clean, accurate, and verifiable. As a result, DevOps teams will not only comprise the conventional software engineering and operation specialists but also require one or two ETL developers.
Also, more businesses will consider using synthetic data to model production processes and identify potential bugs even before deployment. Of course, a lot of research still needs to be done in this sector. However, be that as it may, a tremendous 89% of tech decision-makers already think that synthetic data is crucial for maintaining a competitive advantage.
#2: More GitOps Adoption
One of the challenges of managing DevOps teams, especially in medium to large-scale development projects, is the difficulty of tracking changes in files and directories from multiple contributors. GitOps seeks to address this issue by keeping configurations and workflows in central Git repositories — enabling every team member to have full real-time visibility into code, infrastructure, and app deployment updates.
By offering a single source of truth for declarative infrastructure and application definitions, it ensures every DevOps engineer is reading from the same script, eliminating conventional communication and misalignment issues synonymous with extensive development projects. With this technology, your teams can also implement progressive delivery strategies, such as canary deployments and feature toggles, while ensuring compliance and auditability through version-controlled configurations.
#3: Site Reliability Engineering to Gain More Traction
While site reliability engineering (SRE) and DevOps are sometimes used interchangeably, the two do not mean the same thing in their entirety. As previously mentioned, a DevOps engineer’s primary focus is to eliminate bottlenecks in development lifecycles to ensure more frequent, iterative code releases. SRE, on the other hand, focuses on ensuring the final software products are always available, reliable, and easily scalable.
As more organizations adopt DevOps and the frequency of software updates increases, it’s become necessary to implement responsive measures to ensure that each release is stable and reliable. And that’s why SRE has continued to gain traction over the last couple of years — it helps development teams to “progmatically” foresee and avert availability, reliability, and scalability issues before software updates reach the end-user. Its use of Q/A automation tools also reduces toil and enables DevOps engineers to identify potential tactical problems faster, further reducing the time-to-market.
#4: Kubernetes and Containerization
Kubernetes has emerged as the de facto standard for container orchestration, revolutionizing the way DevOps engineers develop, deploy, and manage applications.
Most people attribute its popularity and unchallenged dominance to its ability to seamlessly automate many aspects of application management, including scaling, load balancing, and resource allocation across several clusters of hosts — ensuring greater flexibility, portability, and scalability. Others say the secret is the platform’s declarative configuration model that allows for easy definition of desired application states, simplifying operational tasks and promoting infrastructure as code practices.
Whatever the reason, we can all agree that Kubernetes’ vibrant ecosystem of tools and integrations offer practical solutions to several modern-day application development and deployment challenges. It’s a no-brainer that it’s one of the fastest-growing projects in the history of open-source software development. With an estimated compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.4% over the next decade, it’s only second to Linux.
#5: Serverless Computing
Serverless computing, also known as function as a service (FaaS), abstracts away the underlying infrastructure, allowing developers to focus solely on writing and deploying code in the form of functions. This paradigm shift eliminates the need for provisioning and managing servers, enabling DevOps engineers to rapidly iterate and scale applications without worrying about infrastructural concerns. It can be particularly handy when working on projects with unpredictable workloads or sudden spikes in traffic because it allows resources to be provisioned dynamically based on demand. This elasticity ensures optimal resource utilization and cost efficiency — you’ll only pay for the compute resources consumed by your functions.
One of the key reasons for the popularity of serverless computing in DevOps is its ability to accelerate development cycles. By abstracting away infrastructure management, serverless computing enables teams to focus on building and delivering features faster, fostering a culture of continuous integration and deployment. Moreover, its architectures promote a modular approach to application development, encouraging the decomposition of monolithic applications into smaller, more manageable functions that can be independently deployed and scaled. This microservices-oriented approach aligns with DevOps principle of continuous development and enhances agility, scalability, and fault tolerance, facilitating easier maintenance and updates.
#6: Security DevOps (DevSecOps)
With the complexity and cost of cyber threats increasing by the day, over 58% of business executives believe cyber atatcks are a big threat to their operations. That explains why the DevSecOps market has been recording a CAGR of 28.85% for most part of this decade and is expected to reach a market value of $19 billion by 2030.
DevSecOps is a software development methodology that integrates security practices into the DevOps process, emphasizing collaboration between development, operations, and security teams. Unlike traditional approaches where security is often an afterthought, DevSecOps ensures that security considerations are addressed from the outset of the development lifecycle. This involves implementing automated security testing, code analysis, and vulnerability scans within the continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline, enabling teams to identify and remediate security issues before they become too embedded in the codebase to eliminate. It also facilitates a cultural shift towards shared responsibility for security, fostering collaboration and transparency across teams — promoting organizationwide cyber-awareness and reducing human error which accounts for 95% of most cyberattacks.
Stay Ahead of Emerging Trends With Competent DevOps Engineers From Devengine
As we’ve demonstrated, DevOps is a relatively new concept that’s still in the development stages. Organizations that will master and leverage it this early will reap an enormous competitive advantage. Let us help you become one of these organizations by connecting you with competent DevOps engineers from Latin America.
