How DevOps Will Change In The Next Few Years

DevOps, a word coined by Patrick Dubois in 2009, describes every process that goes into building, deploying, and maintaining applications and services.

An integral part of the Agile methodology, DevOps has gained wide acceptance in the tech industry for its efficiency. The process is known to aid the faster deployment of codes. For example, projects that would have taken months to roll out can now take a few weeks.

As the demand for faster delivery of software products increases, DevOps seems to be the way forward for every industry in 2023. 

Let’s explore how DevOps will impact the next few years by closely examining its current state and trends.

Evolution of DevOps

In 2010, at a conference in San Francisco, Patrick Dubois and John Willis employed the term "DevOps" to describe how to combine development and operations best practices to deploy efficient code updates to live production systems using technologies like Puppet and SaltStack. 

Research by Global Market Insights shows that the DevOps market is expected to grow from $4 billion in 2019 at a whopping 20% CAGR till 2026.

The relevance of DevOps in digital transformation initiatives is already widely acknowledged, and it will only grow in the years to come.

Prioritizing DevOps will give organizations greater agility, a quicker time to market, better customer experiences, and a competitive advantage. DevOps will continue to adapt to and develop alongside the changing software development environment.

The Future of DevOps - Trends

Several experts predict significant changes and developments in DevOps in the upcoming years, and the topic is the subject of much discussion and conjecture. 

To satisfy the shifting demands of organizations and the market, DevOps must adapt and change along with technology, which is still developing quickly. Here are some DevOps trends for 2023 and beyond:

Microservice Architecture 

There are different ways software programs are structured. One of which is monolithic architecture.

With monolithic architecture, making changes to a small part of the software can be quite tasking and often results in deploying a newer version of the full software. 

However, microservice architecture rapidly eliminates this bottleneck in product delivery. 

Microservice architecture is a way of cutting down complex applications into smaller, independent, scalable units and services. This way, changes can easily be integrated without working the whole code base over.

While we don't hold the philosopher's stone, we can only predict that most companies will adopt this agile methodology to stay competitive in the coming years.

AI/ML In DevOps Framework 

Gartner predicts that in 2023, 40% of DevOps teams will use AI alongside infrastructure monitoring to achieve better IT capabilities.

The last few years have seen massive growth in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) fields. Integrating these solutions into DevOps might as well be what the industry is waiting for.

Processes that require much planning and coding today can be automated using AI and ML solutions, making deploying faster yet more efficient software products possible. 

DevSecOps 

The word "DevOps" is a fusion of "Development" and "Operations." But these days, where security is everything, there's a need for another fusion with security, and that birthed what we now refer to as "DevSecOps."

We wouldn't assume this is self-explanatory, so here is it in simpler terms. As the work culture tends towards working remotely, many companies' data runs back and forth between different clouds and data centers. There has not been a greater need for security than now.

Different methods are used to prevent breaches, attacks, and data loss, but the most effective and scalable is incorporating and automating security right from the time of coding. This approach doesn't just prevent security breaches, and it also speeds up deployment while cutting costs.

Kubernetes 

It has become increasingly more accessible for businesses to integrate Kubernetes with DevOps due to its emergence as a top container orchestration engine. 

As Kubernetes provides a versatile platform for application deployment in any environment with any infrastructure or cloud provider, businesses from all sectors have quickly adopted it.

Starting a local Kubernetes cluster on a developer's machine is now surprisingly simple. As a result, Kubernetes features may be used and relied upon by developers early in the development process. It doesn't appear that Kubernetes will soon lose market share.

The Future of DevOps In The Information Technology Industry 

By streamlining processes, DevOps enables developers to release new features more quickly. The future of DevOps in the IT sector is promising.

The IT industry is beginning to see more reasons to have DevOps professionals in their product development circle. 

DevOps professionals oversee product development through its deployment while providing tremendous insights that could help to automate a mundane and repetitive task that might delay its deployment.

The Role of Automation in DevOps

Naturally, as the production speed increases, maintaining accuracy becomes a challenge. One of the significant ways to go around this is through automation.

DevOps depends on automation to fill various gaps to meet demands and quality. Automating mundane and manual tasks can free up enough time to focus on producing at market speed.

The process of testing and deploying codes can be time-consuming while rolling out new product features. DevOps automates this by using Infrastructure as code (IAC) to automatically create new features and destroy them when it's no longer in use.

Automating software testing does not come without its drawbacks too. For example, automating testing is a huge task such that DevOps engineers pay close attention to the whole process even while automating it. 

However, the best testing results come while using matured AI/ML solutions to automate testing.

In the future, the DevOps circle will develop even more effective automation tools and processes that will allow faster rollout of products.

Final Thoughts

For over a decade, DevOps have sought to continually challenge our perception of what is possible in the software development world.

Companies that want to stay relevant by constantly pushing out products that are efficient and scalable at market speed have started adopting the DevOps process as opposed to the monolithic architecture of product development.

SBBD produces scalable and efficient software solutions 75% faster than most companies because of our fine-tuned DevOps and rapid development. Almost every report on DevOps has predicted that this process has come to stay and might be adopted by even more companies in later years. Contact us to learn how you can too adopt DevOps strategies.