Futuro do DevOps: Mudança nos próximos 5 anos

Future of DevOps: Change in the next 5 years

June 3, 2024 Roberto Magalhães

In just over 10 years, DevOps has become the de facto standard for running IT — and it's just getting started.

Although DevOps has only existed as a codified discipline for just over a decade, it has been so widely adopted that it is now the standard way most IT shops work with their developers.

DevOps is the combination of software development and IT operations into a cohesive unit that shares responsibility for running and maintaining an organization's software portfolio.

In the past, software developers built applications and IT managed them. Because developers and IT often had conflicting goals, responsibilities, and marching orders, running and maintaining the software they created was a significant and time-consuming challenge for the IT operations team. With the arrival of DevOps, however, the two groups now work together to ensure production systems run smoothly.

Still, the reasons why DevOps has been adopted so quickly are primarily business-focused. Software updates that used to take weeks or months to go into production can now be done in hours. This improves business agility and rapid business model transformation to meet changing customer demands and requirements. And by keeping downtime to a minimum, DevOps has been shown to increase business resilience as well.

Future of DevOps: what's coming

According to analysts, DevOps' focus on business outcomes will continue for the foreseeable future as it evolves from a discipline focused on IT operations to a discipline focused on business outcomes. To achieve this product-focused orientation, DevOps teams will increasingly be defined by purpose rather than function. These include:

Feature teams aligned to the business and end user
Coaching and internal consultancy provided by training teams
Platform teams to support feature team developers
Specialized teams (also known as infrastructure or platform teams) focused on mainframes and other specialized hardware

The way these teams are led will also change. Many organizations today are experimenting with less hierarchical, collaborative leadership approaches that draw on all the different areas of expertise that make up a given team.

#1 Practice vs. Process

Today, DevOps is still a discipline focused on internal processes. Your KPIs focus on team results, activities, and outcomes. In the future, KPIs will focus more on measurable customer and stakeholder outcomes, also known as business outcomes. DevOps practices will align value streams focused on business speed and agility.

For DevOps to scale, automation of routine, repeatable processes will continue to grow. This includes greater automation around governance, compliance, security and standardized IT operations.

Tasks will be divided into those that automation is suited to perform and those that require a greater degree of understanding that only a human can realistically apply. Automation will also free up hard-to-find, highly skilled developers and IT talent to focus on higher value-added activities such as exception management, solution design, and creative problem solving.

#2: Cybersecurity takes center stage

Cybersecurity is a board-level discussion today. No matter how much security there is, no organization is safe from cybercrime. As Agile development practices continue to move more code into production faster than ever, ensuring it is secure when going live has never been more important.

DevOps will continue its evolution to DevSecOps, where security best practices are incorporated into the software release cycle. This will be achieved by inviting security teams to initial application planning sessions and ensuring that basic security tools such as multi-factor authentication are in place. This early-stage collaboration will increase overall security and organizational agility.

Code-based change management will replace swivel chair integration, where someone manually enters change tickets into a service desk solution like ServiceNow. In the future, DevOps pipelines will be seamlessly integrated with service desk management platforms. This will reduce errors and speed up release cycles by ensuring all change requests are completed before going live.

#3 Platforms and Automation

As DevOps continues on this evolutionary path, automation will play an increasingly larger role . DevOps teams will move away from point solutions by adopting integrated SDLC pipelines that run on dedicated platforms. These platforms can include MLOps capabilities, unified CI/CD/CDRA, low-code/no-code platforms, and will extend to the edge of the network.

Automation requires detailed, real-time data to effectively improve risk management. This is why machine learning algorithms will play a more important role in risk analysis in future development pipelines.

#4 DevSecOps becomes huge

Security will remain at the top of the priority list for companies of all sizes, so it's no surprise that DevSecOps will become more popular than ever during 2021. As development teams increasingly adopt cloud-based technologies, The development lifecycle will need a cloud-native security approach that can only come from DevSecOps.

By integrating security and testing into development pipelines now governed by DevOps, teams will be able to integrate stronger protections into their work, especially with higher levels of automation. By adopting a DevSecOps-centric methodology, developers will ensure the appropriate level of security throughout the development lifecycle while increasing regulatory compliance with applicable security standards.

#5 Toolsets get more complex

DevOps teams use numerous tools to support their daily activities. The main purpose of using this group of tools (often called “toolkits”) is to help engineers collaborate and measure their work. Given the popularity of DevOps, the number of tools for this specific purpose is growing by the minute. However, it is not just the number of toolchains that will increase during 2021, but also their complexity.

This is a natural response to implementing security into DevOps practices and the widespread adoption of containers. So, instead of relying on countless different tools to support DevOps tasks, teams will start to migrate to broader, more complex solutions that can handle different tasks throughout the development and delivery cycle. Developers are likely to look for a sophisticated toolset to support different platforms, streamlining operations and increasing productivity in the process.

#6 Teams will adopt APM software

One of the key aspects of the DevOps lifecycle is getting quick feedback, especially during deployments. This is why the emergence of application performance monitoring (APM) applications will solidify during 2021. This is because it can help with monitoring deployments while providing valuable insights into performance. Right now, APM tools can help verify user interactions, discover and track apps, and provide analytics through AI-based algorithms.

However, next year we will see how these tools become even stronger, which will be the main reason that will drive their widespread adoption. The new APM platforms will expand their capabilities to monitor integrated infrastructures with built-in analytics, perfect for scanning networks, databases, containers, microservices, and cloud services. What's more, its integration with AI will make APMs the perfect ally for detecting and predicting anomalies, while providing more insights into customer journeys.

#7: Infrastructure Automation Tools Will Reach Critical Mass

DevOps seeks to ensure continuous delivery and integration, a goal that can be more easily achieved through automation tools. To be more specific, infrastructure automation (IA) applications are perfect for automating the delivery, configuration, and overall management of IT infrastructure. With them, your team can orchestrate multiple and hybrid clouds with efficient resource provisioning and greater reliability.

These benefits will be responsible for the wider adoption of AI tools across different industry pipelines, especially considering that most teams will be looking for more agility for their CI/CD. Naturally, the adoption of AI tools will mean teams move away from custom configurations in favor of enterprise-grade AI tools. While this seemingly means a loss of customization and control, reality shows that AI tools can increase the speed of deployments, ensure reliability across different infrastructures, and reduce costs through automation.

#8 releases will increase your speed and quality

Ultimately, 2021 will be the year DevOps teams increase the speed and quality of their releases. The main reason will be the popularization of Application Release Orchestration (ARO) tools, applications that combine pipeline management with release orchestration. This way, teams can deliver new applications faster as they can scale release activities across different pipelines and tools.

Using ARO tools will increase team productivity as there will be fewer manual tasks to perform. Additionally, they will provide greater visibility into bottlenecks and wait states, which will make it easier to deal with them before they cause major problems. On the rise, ARO's popularity will increase due to the growing need to respond to rapidly changing market demands, a direct consequence of the disruptions to the business landscape caused by the pandemic.

#9: DevOps will become more people-oriented

At its core, DevOps is about people and improving the way they work together. Organizations that successfully deploy DevOps at scale will lean into and embrace this mindset, not just DevOps best practices around CI/CD, automation, and software support and maintenance.

The intercultural nature of established teams lends itself well to problem solving and team support. Different levels of support will begin to collapse into a flatter structure, where the concept of tier 2 support will disappear in favor of more difficult issues escalated directly to product teams and tier 1 support will extend to accommodate tier 1 cases. bottom.

Having adopted DevOps in recent years is not enough to continue enjoying its benefits. DevOps practices are not immutable, as they are constantly evolving: the 5 trends in this article are perfect proof of this. This means you'll have to keep an eye on emerging trends and new tools being made available to DevOps teams and adjust your lifecycle accordingly.

If you liked this, be sure to check out our other DevOps articles.