The Future of DevOps

DevOps is the collaboration of software developers with IT departments. It involves the automation of software delivery and infrastructure. The end result is a unique, optimized solution on people, process, and technology that meets a company's needs. The development process assures bugs are caught because the end users are beta-testing the product. New features are developed as the company needs them, and are subsequently tested swiftly by their users.

DevOps used to be a niche phenomenon, the sort of technique used by Silicon Valley tech companies. But as of late 2016, Gartner estimates that 25 percent of Global 2000 companies use a DevOps system for software development. Over the next several years, it's far more likely that DevOps will become the norm for any company looking to design its own software.

As DevOps has caught fire, I've seen remarkable innovations, and there are more to come. Read on to learn more about how companies are making DevOps techniques work for them, and what trends are on the horizon.

The Dawn of AI

AI is winning a lot of momentum and what once seemed to be only a sci-fi plot is actually being present in all kind of digital products and solutions.

One good example will be leveraging Cognitive Insights. This groundbreaking technology uses machine-learning algorithms to match human domain knowledge with log data, along with open source repositories, discussion forums, and social thread. Using all this information, it makes a data reservoir of relevant insights that may contain solutions to a wide range of critical issues, faced by IT operations and DevOps teams on a daily basis. This will reduce the MTTR and downtown of your environment; will become more predictive by defining paterns.

Microservices and Serverless architecture

It used to be that developers built single large programs to do anything and everything they needed. Now, it's far more likely that they'll build smaller, lighter modules -- microservices -- to interface with a given API or program.

While this may seem like it's simple to implement, it's actually far more technically complex, since different microservices work together and need to be tested in various configurations. But the feedback and iterative development process of DevOps makes that technical complexity far simpler than it would be otherwise.

On the other side Serverless architecture, despite the confusing name, is a style of architecture where we rely to a smaller extent than usual on running our own server-side systems as part of our applications. The best known vendor host of which currently is AWS Lambda.

Lifecycle Development, QE & Continous Monitoring

Developers used to focus on putting out an initial product, with secondary importance granted to patches and updates. Since companies can give feedback to developers in a DevOps system, software becomes more iterative, with less focus on the initial product and more on successive updates. Quality assurance becomes vital; not a footnote in the development process. Continuous testing and continuous monitoring become a vital part of how developers and IT interact with their product.

Automation and New Tools

Because successive iterations of software come out frequently in a DevOps scenario, automation is key. Successful DevOps teams need to find ways to automate updates, patches and software distribution, and they should ideally automate and streamline the feedback process as well.

One of the most vital parts of the automation is adopting new tools. Software developers have been eager to meet the need of DevOps teams, and have put together programs to make feedback and iterative development in a DevOps mold simpler.

Containerization and Kubernetes

Containerization is another Cloud trend that's growing popular in DevOps circles, due to its lightness and versatility. Kubernetes is perhaps one of the most DevOps-friendly containerization platforms out there: it's open-source and automates the deployment of application containers.

Because Kubernetes makes rolling out new versions of software containers simple, it's become a centerpiece of many DevOps systems.

ChatOps

Clear and rapid communication between software developers and IT teams is vital in a DevOps setting. As a result, many DevOps teams use ChatOps.

ChatOps unifies coding and chat. Different ChatOps tools bring different features to the team, but in general ChatOps allows deploying code from chat, opening help tickets and other features. This further streamlines the DevOps process, and proves valuable to many teams.

Agile and Lean

One of the factors that makes DevOps attractive to companies is its efficiency. DevOps, as a method, is more outcome-based than many other development models. Constant interplay between development teams and IT departments reduces waste and improves efficiency. The focus becomes less on pleasing, for instance, the head of a particular department, or appeasing the norms of a certain process, but rather on achieving a certain goal: streamlined, efficient software and development. As more companies grow comfortable with a DevOps model, we can expect to see a stronger focus on outcome, rather than process.

DevOps is an exciting mode of software development, and it's still coming into its own. I'm confident that more companies will turn to DevOps as they learn its benefits. In turn, there'll be a proliferation of tools, use cases with AI, excellent quality engineering techniques and support over a product's lifestyle will become the norm rather than the exception.