2018 DevOps Predictions (Part 1)

Given how fast technology is changing, we thought it would be interesting to ask IT executives to share their thoughts on the biggest surprises in 2017 and their predictions for 2018.

Here's article one of two of what they told us about their predictions for DevOps in 2018. We'll cover additional predictions for 2018 in a subsequent article.

Shashi Kiran, CMO, Quali 

We’re seeing IT environments becoming more and more complex with distributed applications that span hybrid and multi-cloud deployments. With IoT, connected cars and the like production environments in data centers and beyond are incredibly complex. Managing environment complexity is, therefore, a top order for enterprises that are beginning to scale their DevOps practices and their software development environments in general. Team productivity, efficiency, and speed are all dependent on being able to authentically replicate production-like environments and exposing them to Dev/Test teams early on. This enables the shift-left and increases the quality of the testing cycle without compromising on the speed of innovation. We see this resulting in increased uptake of on-demand, self-service environments with governance and business intelligence capabilities being adopted by automation leaders across labs, data centers, and cloud deployments.

Though it is still a bit of an afterthought, we are seeing security slowly become first-class citizens in a DevOps environment.

Finally, we see increased uptake of sandbox automation and orchestration in Dev/Test environments in both traditional data center/ private cloud and public cloud deployments. These would be usage-based consumption models predicated on a pay-as-you-use basis.

Lucas Vogel, Founder, Endpoint Systems 

The future of DevOps will be the implementation of tools such as Slack and Microsoft teams to become killer productivity tools for DevOps practitioners. There will come a day in the near future where communication channels will become rich, interactive ‘shells’ for the cloud, CI/CD and other platforms where teams can run commands and evaluate results, both collaboratively and at the individual level. It will be an enormous productivity boost for the DevOps and other teams and will continue to drive agile product development in new and innovative ways.

PJ Kirner, Co-founder and CTO, Illumio

DevSecOps will shift from a democratic model to a republic: The shift of control from the ministry of security (a.k.a. the department of "no") to the model where the developer can do anything and everything was an overcorrection. It has also introduced unacceptable risk to the business. While it’s important that development, security, and operations all work together, next year we will realize this should not be a democratizing movement (everyone gets a vote) but rather more of a republic model. Developers need to bring their agile development processes and requirements to the table, and security teams bring their security expertise. While these teams have to work together in new ways ultimately, security teams are responsible for doing the right thing. Because, as well all know, there really is no single person who represents all components of DevSecOps equally. It’s all about working across teams with a common language and a common goal, where the expertise of all members is needed and each contingent is valued for their diverse and expert opinions.

Andrew Marshall, Director of Product Marketing, Cedexis

DevOps should see a marked increase in application delivery process automation across the board in 2018. If a tool does not offer true software-defined integration with the rest of the DevOps toolchain, it will likely be retired and replaced by a more frictionless solution. Vendors should ask themselves "what data do I provide, and is it essential?", as well as "how easy is this data to use?". With ephemeral and hybrid infrastructure powering most applications, monitoring this type of automation will focus on the one metric that matters the most: the user experience.

Mike Kail, CTO, CYBRIC

If we have anything to say about it, DevSecOps will be the new DevOps. Security truly needs to be seamlessly embedded into the systems development lifecycle (SDLC) and CI/CD pipeline, instead of an afterthought and a barrier to deployment.

Robert Reeves, Co-founder and CTO, Datical

Fewer and fewer companies will forget the database with DevOps. The database is the hardest part in the application stack to manage, so it just doesn’t make sense that it’s always the forgotten piece of the puzzle. IT teams have been so focused on
time-to-market and getting development to push out applications at the speed of light, but still manually manage the change process of databases that contain massive amounts of information. The good news is that as more enterprises continue to modernize and adopt DevOps processes, it’ll become harder to ignore the database. This is because DevOps is a process, an algorithm. It’s not static and it can’t be done some of the time. The whole purpose is to change and evolve over time. DevOps is about identifying friction that is slowing down software releases. Sometimes, it’s the testing team setting up environments manually. It’s time to automate environment creation to solve not just this one problem, but all problems across the IT department. It’s time to stop having DBAs perform manual SQL script review prior to a release and start automating the review so that they can continue to innovate and bring strategic value to their organization.

In 2018, more and more IT teams will start to see the benefit of bringing DevOps to other areas such as security and the database, and many will start to treat the database as a first-class citizen. Unfortunately, as this realization sets in, companies will regret that they didn’t tackle the problem sooner.

Lee Atchison, Senior Director Strategic Architecture, New Relic

DevOps, dynamic infrastructure and the cloud will continue to be merged into a single set of lockstep systems. Moving or adapting to any one of them will require moving and adapting to all of them. You won’t be able to successfully talk about and implement one without talking about and implementing the others.

To be successful, all three must be embraced.

Justin Rodenbostel, Executive Director, SPR Consulting

For 2018, organizations will continue down the path with containers, armed with tools in the ecosystem targeted at the concerns of organizations reluctant to moving containerized workloads to the cloud – security, storage, and scaling. These more mature, specialized tools will open up the possibility for previously-reluctant organizations to move in this direction with their competitors.

Francois Dechery, Vice President of Customer Success, CloudBees

DevOps data, data, data, data, data, data. Repeat after me: data.

Why? Because it’s not about doing DevOps, it’s about managing DevOps, i.e. once you start to do DevOps, then you need to do it better and better every week. How do you do this? You want DevOps managers. What do they need? DevOps data.

Mark Levy, Director of Strategy, Micro Focus

In 2018 DevOps shifts its focus from Dev to Ops. Most of the DevOps practices have focused mainly on increasing the speed and quality of software delivery. Deployment pipeline automation is being adopted quickly, but as this constraint is being removed, another appears. As software is deployed faster and more frequently, how does Ops support, manage, and keep up with the ever-increasing demand for its services? DevOps practices focusing on how Ops can support and manage increasing capacity demands as software continues to be delivered at an accelerated rate will be a main focus for 2018.

Eran Kinsbruner, Mobile Technical Evangelist, Perfecto

DevOps is changing the mindset of risk management and the testing industry and with that, time is becoming the most critical factor in risk management (as opposed to coverage). In 2018, testing will be thought of as a development corkscrew and not as a bottleneck. With this, we’ll see average release cycles be reduced from weeks to days or even hours. Additionally, advanced technologies that can help optimize the DevOps pipeline and facilitate continuous testing in the form of Machine Learning and Data-driven testing will see growth and investment coming from DevOps teams.

Eric Sigler, Head of DevOps, PagerDuty

1.  The role of ITOps/DevOps is continuing to be more closely tied to end-user experience, which will change the nature of ITOps/DevOps' relationships with other lines of business––particularly customer service. As consumer expectations for a seamless digital experience become increasingly higher, the pressure is now on ITOps/DevOps to address service disruptions quickly while keeping customer support in lock-step as they resolve problems. As we've seen with recent headline-making data breaches, this is particularly true in the case of security incidents. Real-time customer communication about IT and security issues is becoming table stakes, and ITOps/DevOps will need to reconsider their business-wide communications strategy in order to meet these expectations.

2. The amount of data facing ITOps/DevOps practitioners is only going to grow in the coming year and teams will be faced with the increased challenge of finding the signal in the noise––and fast––to resolve incidents. As a result, it will be necessary for ITOps/DevOps to reexamine previous assumptions around automation and responsibility.

3. With increased pressure on ITOps/DevOps to move quickly, and the growing tie between operations and the business bottom line, organizations should take a deeper look at the health of their team. By this, I mean considering the human impact of ITOps/DevOps demands and on-call life. Having ITOps/DevOps teams paged 24/7 is not a sustainable practice, so it will be necessary for some organizations to reassess their triage and workflows to preserve infrastructure team health, ultimately helping with efficiency and retention.

Derek Choy, CIO, Rainforest

In 2018, CIOs will figure out how to scale DevOps without scaling engineering teams. We’ve reached a critical inflection point in DevOps adoption. CIOs will face pressure in 2018 to ensure their businesses are releasing software at speed and quality, without adding cost. CIOs are adopting DevOps as a solution, but there are still many elements of DevOps that are very human intensive. In 2018, CIOs will figure out how to automate DevOps to scale teams while meeting business goals for headcount and recruitment.