Future of DevOps: The Road Ahead

Are you a Software Developer or IT Professional looking to accelerate your delivery and improve your collaboration? If you're interested in the field or want to upgrade your skills, understanding the Future of DevOps can greatly enhance your career prospects.

With the rapid evolution of technology, tools, and practices, the Future of DevOps is shaping up to be more agile, scalable, and secure than ever before. This insightful blog explores your questions by presenting a detailed analysis of the Future of DevOps, highlighting its trends, challenges, and opportunities. This blog will help you stay ahead of the curve, ensuring you adopt the best strategies to optimise your performance and quality in Software Development and IT Operations.

Table of Contents

1) What is DevOps?

2) The role of DevOps in the Digital Economy

3) Trends that will affect the Future of DevOps

4) The Future of DevOps: Possibilities and challenges 

5) Conclusion

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a set of principles and practices designed to help organisations in creating, deploying, and maintaining applications and services. It is a balanced approach with an aim to improve coordination between Software Development and Information Technology (IT) operations.

In 2009, the term "DevOps" was given by Patrick Dubois in his article "The New DevOps." He talked about how DevOps would become important based on real-life examples. It appears that DevOps is becoming a significant part of the future of Software Development and operations, and it looks like it has a bright future ahead.

However, it wasn't until 2010 when Patrick Dubois and John Willis officially named the phrase "DevOps" during a conference in San Francisco. Their discussion revolved around the efficient deployment of code updates to live production systems using automation tools like Puppet, Chef, and SaltStack.


 

The role of DevOps in the digital economy 

A large number of organisations have started using DevOps as a means to improve efficiency and productivity. The advantages of implememting DevOps roadmap include shorter development cycles, lower costs, higher quality, and more flexibility. DevOps is also expected to allow businesses of all sizes to operate and prosper as the digital economy expands rapidly. Automation plays an essential role in the Future of DevOps as the DevOps teams are moving away from top-point solutions and towards integrated Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) processes supported by specialised platforms.

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Trends that will affect the Future of DevOps

DevOps stands as a process focused on connecting Software Development and operations with the primary goal of accelerating the deployment process. However, its purpose extends beyond velocity improvement; it also includes the improvement of code quality, bug reduction, and the delivery of more valuable features to end-users.
 

Over the past decade, DevOps has experienced a significant evolution. Present-day DevOps exceeds the restrictions of task automation or developer-written scripts. It has transformed into a culture and philosophy, offering a comprehensive understanding of how businesses can thrive by embracing DevOps principles. The Future of DevOps is based on improved communication and an abundance of job opportunities due to the following emerging trends:

a) Microservices architecture: This innovative approach to Software Design has divided applications into smaller, independently developed and deployable components known as Microservices. This flexibility may allow organisations to adapt to changing markets by adding new features or scaling operations without causing disruptions across the entire application. 

b) Cloud-native technology: The adoption of Cloud-native technology is influencing Microservices, containers, and firm infrastructure to design and deploy software. This may reduce dependencies on a single application, offering rapid iterations and allowing deployments without disturbing ongoing services. 

c) Automation and CI/CD: DevOps is dependent on the convergence of Software Development and IT Operations to create more efficient, cost-effective, and powerful systems. As businesses shift toward infrastructure automation, they may blend Automating Testing and deployment processes to keep pace with technological advancements. 

d) AI/ML in DevOps framework: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are increasingly employed to automate repetitive tasks, optimise resource allocation, and improve quality assurance. These technologies may speed up operations, minimise manual intervention, and improve resource management. 

e) Integration of Kubernetes with DevOps: Kubernetes is a major container engine that has become important in integrating DevOps into organisational workflows. It can offer a versatile platform for deploying applications across various environments and infrastructure providers. 

f) Low-code applications: The rise of low-code applications is automating business processes and speeding up delivery. This may lead to cuts in IT costs, streamlined change management and scalable solutions for evolving business processes. 

g) GitOps growing adoption: GitOps has emerged as an innovative approach to managing infrastructure and code within the DevOps pipeline. It may extend the principles of Git version control to application workloads, improving agility, security, and stability and simplifying deployment processes. 

h) DevSecOps (Agile Security): DevSecOps has integrated security into the development process, ensuring that security is an inherent component of software creation rather than an afterthought. This approach may address longstanding security concerns in the industry and safeguard customers from vulnerabilities.

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The Future of DevOps: Possibilities and challenges 

So now since we have an idea of the Future of DevOps let’s talk about few possibilities and challenges of DevOps:

Possibilities

The following are the possible outcomes of following DevOps trends:

1) Delivering value to customers- DevOps practices and solutions are expected to minimise the time taken to yield results. The cycle time from completion of a story/defect/task to production is reduced. It may allow IT organisations to focus on their core business activities by removing constraints within the value stream. Teams can focus on the customer activities that create customer value rather than just moving bits and bytes. At the same time, it increases the sustainable competitive advantage of a company and creates better business outcomes.  

2) Reduced time cycle- Internally, DevOps is the only way to achieve the agility to deliver secure code with insights. It may help in having a well-crafted DevOps process. DevOps is expected to drive app development teams towards continuous improvement and faster release cycles.  

3) Time to market- The most crucial problem it may solve is the reduction in the complexity of processes. This is expected to contribute significantly to the business's success by shortening the time to market, giving fast feedback to features, and making it more responsive to the customers' needs.  

4) Improved collaboration between development and operation teams- In the future, DevOps is expected to contribute to one of the significant benefits: enhanced collaboration between development and operations teams in an organisation. It may help overcome obstacles with faster and smoother development processes, extending better support for customer needs.   

5) Problem resolution- The most significant value of successful DevOps implementation will be increased confidence in delivery, visibility, and traceability to what's going on, thus solving problems quicker.

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Challenges

While the Future of DevOps seems fascinating, it can pose certain challenges that are as follows: 

1) Communication problems between security and development teams- Developers and security teams have entirely different goals. Security teams focus on security over speed to deliver secure applications. This often means spending significant amounts of time reviewing applications before each release. 

2) Ineffective Credential Management and Access Controls- Secure SHell (SSH) keys, privileged account login information, and API tokens are a few examples of credentials. Personnel, services, containers, and many other organisations might not efficiently use these. 

3) Difficulty in coping up with the DevOps cycle- Rapid delivery and brief development cycles are the key focus of DevOps. Security teams find it difficult to be extremely thorough when examining the security of the applications and their surroundings because it typically only takes one mistake to harm a company seriously. 

4) Cultural challenges- Workplace culture has the highest impact of changes made during the development phase. If organisations are not able to handle change management, it clashes with the already existing work culture. The cultural barriers are often complex for employees to adjust to .To complete the Software Development process, fixing these problems before implementing DevOps is essential. 

Conclusion 

The  Future of DevOps can be bright for  IT Operations in many organisations. To achieve success in the days ahead, IT and Software Development organisations will have to stick to focused outcomes that matter to the organisations. The Future of DevOps is all about trust and empowerment, as it includes Software Development and IT Operations.

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