Is the Future of DevOps a hopeful one? Or is it another practice that will stay in the past with the constant changes in the software development market? As the number of companies following this methodology increases, the debate gets clearer: DevOps is not only here to stay but also evolving and growing.
Nevertheless, as it happens, this will depend on each organization’s ability to innovate and adapt to how the environment changes.
In this blog, we’ll discuss what the future holds for DevOps and the tools that will be fundamental for its successful implementation.
Table of contents
- What is DevOps?
- The Future of DevOps
- Future Trends of DevOps
- Challenges of implementing DevOps
- Conclusion
What is DevOps?
DevOps is an agile approach that combines innovative practices and technologies to improve software development and transform organizational culture for a successful collaboration between departments.
It appeared for the first time in 2009, thanks to Patrick Dubois. Now, organizations of all types and sizes are implementing it. DevOps brings together the development and operations departments but also offers a change in traditional processes to increase productivity, communication, risk management, and customer satisfaction.
You’ll find DevOps in every step of creating great software solutions. From planning and designing to developing, testing, and maintaining, DevOps is present in the full Software Development Life Cycle implementing automation and rapid delivery.
What are the Benefits of DevOps?
As DevOps is a methodology, a set of practices, and a mindset, it offers a long list of advantages to every business that implements it. Here are a few of DevOps’s main benefits.
Faster and optimized processes
DevOps prioritizes faster and constant delivery without sacrificing quality and safety. It ensures a reliable process that brings quick problem solutions and focuses on continuously delivering software. Therefore, this improves customer satisfaction and keeps the company competitive.
Improved collaboration
DevOps methodology aims for the union of departments that had always been separate. Development and Operations can collaborate through specific and efficient processes, which reflects better results for the company, its team, and its clients. DevOps promotes transparency, clear feedback, continuous monitoring, and easy communication. Overall, it helps build a safe and productive workspace.
Increased productivity and quality
With the right DevOps tools, your team will be more productive and develop high-quality products while reducing costs and attending to any issue that might arise.
Security and innovation through automation
Managing security and innovation tasks manually can mean using valuable resources. Implementing security measures and innovative strategies through automation, as DevOps emphasizes, can be more practical, cost-effective, and successful.
Agile business
Another core characteristic of DevOps is using agile methods to enable close collaboration and improve the overall organization’s processes.
The Future of DevOps
So, what will the future of DevOps look like? There are assumptions and questions about how it will still fit into a constantly changing environment.
But DevOps is revolutionary. Its philosophy stands for agility, innovation, automation, and an improved response to market and client demands. Meaning that even though it will greatly depend on each organization, the future of DevOps remains bright and promising as it adapts to new trends and technologies.
The key is to take advantage of available tools and new technologies, always aiming toward automation.
Future of DevOps: Trends
With the right tools, organizations can create the perfect strategy for their goals and expectations.
Especially in today’s era, where technology trends keep rising and providing better solutions, choosing the ideal tools and keeping them updated is essential for DevOps efforts to offer the best results possible.
🚀 Emergence of Automation and Artificial Intelligence
Organizations must stay on top of technological innovations. But constantly focusing on manual and repetitive tasks can take up valuable resources that could be better used elsewhere.
This urgently calls for organizations to take the necessary steps toward Automation and Artificial Intelligence, and this action will boost the future of DevOps. In 2023, businesses in all areas have already confirmed how integrating these can streamline and accelerate their processes, offer better client service, and improve team productivity and happiness.
Overall, Artificial Intelligence and Automation help DevOps teams identify problems and offer quick and effective solutions. Teams can use AI and automation tools for:
- Resource allocation and optimization
- Enabling deep learning and data mining
- Automating testing and deployment
- Quality assurance
- Staying on top of technological updates and changes
Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) play a fundamental role in the present and future of DevOps. It is an innovative approach that helps organizations constantly deliver software and features quickly and reliably. Overall, CI/CD promotes automation in many processes inside the software development life cycle, like your testing phase.
The future of DevOps and CI/CD is encouraging, and we owe that to the boost brought by technological advances like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
🚀 Security in the Future of DevOps
What’s one top priority when developing a product? Security.
There is not only huge positive innovation and transformation in the tech world, with infrastructure and networks getting increasingly sophisticated. Security threats are also growing and becoming more complex, affecting the safety of applications and their users.
Now teams must dedicate more efforts and resources to maintain security in their projects. This can mean processing vast amounts of data, constant examination and testing, and increasing cloud computing costs.
Manually managing these tasks can result in slow detection and solving issues, therefore leaving your environment vulnerable and possibly affecting compliance with security regulations.
Truthfully, it can’t be sustainable in the long term for organizations to not automate and use innovative tools to help them manage their product security. That is why automation will continue to be a huge player in the future of DevOps, providing teams with a completely automated system to maintain their applications’ security.
Activities where security automation is now necessary
Security has to be implemented since the early stages of the DevOps strategy in activities like the following:
1. Monitoring and detecting: In order to have clear visibility of the environment, teams can use security automation tools. Automated and repetitive monitoring of the system allows teams to prevent or quickly respond to any vulnerability.
2. Threat identification: Security breaches can cost millions of dollars and compromise entire organizations. That calls for companies to implement quick and continuous threat detection processes that require less manual intervention.
3. Incident response: Determining the damage caused and the proper response to the issue is an important step that can be automated, so the incident can be resolved faster and better without taking up many valuable resources.
4. Permission management: Controlling access and permissions is essential for ensuring security. These tasks can and must be automated as infrastructure becomes more complex and the number of users increases.
🚀 Increase in Collaboration
Understanding that DevOps is all about integrating teams and promoting collaboration is fundamental to adopting DevOps into your organization. There is a need to break down silos and any friction that might exist among the departments.
DevOps promotes a deep and empathic knowledge of each department’s core tasks and responsibilities to develop strategies that increase collaboration between them.
Will this collaboration ensure the future of DevOps? It will definitely be a fundamental factor in why organizations keep adopting these practices. Easy and successful communication allows team members to understand their different perspectives and find better, more effective solutions with fewer mistakes.
🚀 Adoption of DevOps Across Industries
The future of DevOps in the IT industry is secured as it optimizes and improves the entire software development process. But DevOps can be implemented across every type and size of company, no matter if it’s not tech-centric.
In the Healthcare Industry, for example. It constantly manages a large amount of delicate data, and it must be easy to access but also completely secure. This industry can adopt DevOps practices to optimize resources and ensure the organization complies with security regulations like HIPAA.
Regarding Banking and Finance, they have to keep up with the big customer demand for banking solutions that improve their experience and protect their transactions. Ensuring this great service requires a lot of work with digital platforms. And DevOps is key to reducing the manual workload and offering better results for the customer. It maintains documentation easier, allows more systematic communications, ensures secured transactions, and streamlines financial processes thanks to its automation tools.
The Manufacturing Industry also has a strong DevOps presence thanks to its need to create new products and accelerate production processes. Machines and manufacturing processes now have software applications incorporated, and DevOps helps them keep up with the needed pace for manufacturing.
Other industries where you can find DevOps strategies are the insurance company, retail, and inventory management. Where cross-department communication is necessary, and production needs to be streamlined.
This is a perfect example of how DevOps is more than just a tech trend. Any organization can adopt its philosophies to help them adapt to how quickly the market is changing. And that is why the future of DevOps looks so promising; it is a very flexible and beneficial mindset wherever it is implemented.
Current trends that we’ll still see in the Future of DevOps:
Cloud-native technology: A combination of methodologies focusing on building products and features, not only managing infrastructure. With cloud-native architecture, applications can be more reliable, scalable, and maintainable. It also provides high availability and reduces time-to-market. This approach will continue to appear in the future of DevOps as it follows DevOps practices combined with cloud services methodologies and software principles.
Microservices architecture: It goes hand in hand with the market’s demands regarding the future of DevOps. Microservices break down complex applications into small services, which makes it easier, faster, and more reliable to deploy them.
Read the full comparison of Microservices vs Monolith to learn more about this architecture.
Kubernetes and Container Orchestration: Kubernetes is getting more and more popular as it is a powerful tool to deploy, manage and scale containerized apps. Managing containerized apps distributed across multiple deployment environments can be a complex process; this is where organizations need to implement container orchestration. These are growing tools in the future of DevOps because managing platforms with a unified platform allow tech teams to scale them, deploy updates, and reduce manual activities.
As you can see, what makes the future of DevOps successful is the tools and trends available dedicated to automating, streamlining, and making processes more efficient.
Get into the complete list of DevOps Trends: Read the full blog here.
Challenges of implementing DevOps
Transformation and innovation come with challenges. And this also applies when implementing DevOps, especially as some misinterpretation about what it is and its application still exists.
One of the challenges of implementing DevOps is not considering it as an organizational and cultural change. Hiring a DevOps engineer is a huge step toward integrating the mindset, but adopting its principles and culture is essential for companies that want to execute a DevOps strategy fully.
Having a clear vision and a plan to implement your strategy is another challenge when adopting DevOps. Defining your company’s requirements, choosing an architecture, the tools you will use, and building a reliable DevOps team is quite a big challenge.
Additionally, keeping up with the demands has also been a constant challenge for DevOps teams. Because much time and resources are being dedicated to manually handling important tasks like security. Teams can feel the pressure of delivering results faster while also having the responsibility of ensuring that security and quality are not compromised. Here is where the urgency of automation appears, as manual approaches aren’t as sustainable and scalable as the market demands.
Ultimately, the complete list of challenges will depend on your company and its characteristics.
Conclusion
To sum up, we will see DevOps thriving for a long time. The future of DevOps looks promising as it is continuously implementing tools to promote automation, faster delivery, and easy collaboration. DevOps’ ability to evolve and transform according to the market demands will help this mindset stay up-to-date and relevant as the tech world changes.
Some fundamental trends that will be present in the future of DevOps include Security Automation to have a full system that keeps the application secured without having to do it manually. Also, Artificial Intelligence in DevOps and Machine Learning will keep being implemented for more efficient, smart, and agile products.
More and more diverse companies will keep implementing DevOps to help them create the solutions they need to satisfy customers without sacrificing unnecessary resources and by protecting the organization’s most valuable asset: their team.
The future of DevOps brings new possibilities to organizations that incorporate a strategy that better adapts to their needs. DevOps’ correct implementation is what will determine the favorable outcome. To ensure you’re part of the bright future of DevOps, look for the right partner for this journey.
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