Merging development and operations into DevOps enables greater coordination and collaboration of those previously separate teams – and a greater ability to meet customer needs and provide greater value. A DevOps culture is better positioned than disparate teams to respond to change and take products to market more quickly, and teams have greater confidence in the quality of the software they produce. Since DevOps methodology began in 2009, it has revolutionized many software companies, but, according to industry leaders, great things are still ahead. Consider these DevOps trends as you plan for a successful 2021.
1. Emphasis on Op-Led Development
Adam Frank, VP of Product and Design at Moogsoft, predicts, “In 2021, there will be more emphasis on an ops-led development mentality. Now more than ever, companies need to deliver value and do it fast without breaking things. Ops-led development will put in the practice of observability throughout the entire DevOps cycle to continuously learn and build for an increased level of reliability.”
2. New Focus on Multicloud and Edge
Lelah Manz, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Web Performance at Akamai, identifies another DevOps trend. “After a decade of consolidation and centralization of services in the cloud, businesses are now gravitating again towards more decentralized, hybrid environments that are less prone to the risks of monocultural infrastructure and vendor lock-in,” she says.
“Multi-vendor and multi-technology strategies offer more flexibility, fewer dependencies, and fewer single points of failure. Edge nodes outside of the cloud are added as a place to run custom code,” Manz explains. “In 2021, DevOps teams will have to adjust their tools, technologies and practices to better manage these more diverse environments. ‘Everything as Code’ will be one approach, but it won’t be universally available in 2021 and will not be the one silver bullet.”
3. Builder Culture Will Continue to Drive Innovation
Manz adds, “Builder culture has evolved from DIY and open-source ethics of a decade ago to one that has vendors recognizing the importance of putting control and creativity in the hands of the developers they serve.”
“As forward-leaning organizations embrace their roles as creators of digital experiences for their end users, the ability for developers to independently innovate becomes tantamount to their competitive differentiation and — ultimately — their success. Platform vendors who recognize this shift will assist in ushering in the next era of developer-led innovation by empowering development teams to create freely and by delivering the tools and visibility that developers need to create, test, and understand the impact of new digital experiences,” she says.
4. DevOps and CloudOps Absorb the DBA Role
Venkat Rajaji, VP of Product Management for Information Management at Quest Software, predicts, “As organizations embrace more full-stack responsibilities, database administrator (DBA) roles and responsibilities will get subsumed by decentralized DevOps teams and centralized Cloud Ops teams. Organizations are increasingly looking to have fully integrated full-stack teams, which means the central model of specialized capability with DBAs are going to move towards more Scrum orientation and subsumed by full-stack teams.”
5. Analytics Enables Smarter DevOps
Manz adds that incorporating analytics is another growing DevOps trend. “Mature DevOps organizations are at the stage today where they are close to maximizing efficiency gains across their workflows. As these organizations look to go even faster and increase productivity, data science, artificial intelligence (AI), and automated analytical tools will become more integrated into workflows to improve efficiency and time to market,” she says.
“Developers will look to data science tooling to better project application outcomes through historical data and telemetry around repository logs, test results, infrastructure workloads, and more. This coupled with more intelligent alerting and smarter event-driven triggers will drive continuous integration workflows that unlock the next wave of productivity-driven success,” says Manz.
