Whats Next ? Beyond DevOps
Everyone who belongs to era of 2010-2019 knows very well about DevOps and its emerging from zero to conquering most the organisations with its own culture. DevOps concept is now a decade old and it will be not long when people will start looking for whats beyond Devops.
Once upon a time Unix/system admins were used to the backbone at the DC to basic Infrastructure set up. But they were very naive and when they have to come out of every day routine tasks to do some thing which can reduce the efforts it was a battle for them. On the vary hand we had developers who used to have very less idea whats happening at infrastructure end and how to improve things to work great utilising optimum cores / mem / cpu etc.
DevOps culture bought the awareness of CI/CD to configuration management in the same set of people. Now we have admins who learned python and started writing a lot of code to automate their daily stuff. We have developers who use CI/CD and configuration management for their deployment and its not like before when they liked to copy the war file and test it out at VM.
Containers and Devops ? They should be different isn't it ?
Containers and Microservices have taken things for ride rather a speedy ride. The same system teams moved forward and started using containers for their infra deployments and that made upscale and downscale very easy. The same set of developers started using docker for their testing and using a docker file they just do test on running instance of container and do changes in their code, write docker file etc. Containers simplify the build/test/deploy pipelines in DevOps. It also helps to support multiple frameworks.
Whats Next ??
We had Ops , DevOps, DevSecOps, SecOps and so on. But if you see very clearly in all of them "Ops" being a integral part of this whole cultural movement as this also throws a light over significance of Operations in IT and Industry.
As the industry is moving towards now to Infrastructure as a code (IAAS) this terminology needs a change here. The provisioning to orchestrations which used to be part of totally different line of actions are now in same directions. Writing down a terraform code to run and call your public cloud api's and start provisioning VMs, LAN's, network card to Security groups and the same code extends to install your basic utilities on the VM and also bring your app / code from your repo build it on the machine and to make it prod ready so you just hit url:port.
Whats the difference , use of multiple tools (mix bag ) will remain as part for many orgs. Some of them will still put Chef / Puppet as a center of their config management and some of them might use Ansible to be a part of their post deployment configuration management.
But the above scenario stay true for most of them who uses VM's. This will go for a change in the containers environment when the same calls would enable the teams to get containers forked with every thing build and also to do clean slate. The movement towards clustered container computing environment brings flexibility for that a good example is K8.
Your deployment pipelines not even set things up for you but also provides options to set up a seamless automated operations response system. the future lies in Bots / AI based logic to machine learning and behaviour shaping of operations data and providing proactive and predictive analysis of any incident that could occur in near future. How about that you not only provisioned your infra at one go but also have a bot which keeps an eye on each at every metrics , get its own data set loaded and use behaviour shaping to find any incident that could happen and inform teams in advance thus reducing a lot of loss in terms of time and revenue.
We might need to look for a new abbreviation or may be a new Jargon for this but certainly this looks like the future we are moving towards.
Thanks
Yadu Mathur
