DevOps in 2019 (Part 2)

Given the speed with which technology is evolving, we asked IT professionals to share their thoughts about how the agile methodology would evolve in 2019. 

Here's what they told us about agile and DevOps:

Jonathan Henrique de Souza, Software Developer, ArcTouch

While developers (and their companies) continue to demand better cross-platform development tools, Apple will launch a hybrid development platform for iOS + macOS. Many traditional mobile apps will migrate to this platform (develop once, deploy to all Mac platforms). Cross-platform development efficiencies lead to more rapid release cycles among agile teams.

Alex Salazar, VP of Product Strategy, Okta

In 2019, more companies will begin to prioritize DevOps as the focus of their agile strategy. As nearly every company is shifting their business model towards software in some capacity, those that will be successful will recognize their ability to be agile can only be accomplished if they are automating as much of their pipeline as possible.

Ravi Tharisayi, Senior Product Marketing Manager, New Relic

DevOps tools have made it easy to instrument, but it’s getting harder for engineers to ensure they’re making the right decisions with all of that data. Advanced statistical models, machine learning, and other artificial intelligence capabilities will become even more critical to guiding engineers to the right problem at the right time and avoid data deluge.

Andreas Prins, Vice President of Product Development, XebiaLabs

In 2019, integrating CI pipelines with the overall DevOps pipelines will become a priority for organizations that want to increase time spent on feature development and accelerate time to production. The ability to monitor CI pipelines and their data alongside other pipeline activities will be essential for keeping everyone in the release process up-to-date and for reducing the amount of time developers spend on extraneous tasks.

Lisa Wells, Vice President of Product Marketing, XebiaLabs

As speed and quality of software delivery are now massive competitive advantages for large enterprises, more organizations will look to value stream mapping to understand whether they’re connecting the dots between their software development and overall business value. This shift will reduce waste across the software release pipeline and create greater cross-functional team collaboration.

In 2019, the pressure on IT to continually improve the business value of software will increase. As a result, organizations will look for ways to mine the large amounts of machine data created by their delivery process, expanding beyond postmortem analysis to include predictive DevOps. This approach will allow them to better anticipate problems in their delivery flow and infrastructure that could negatively impact application quality and security and slow down time to market.

Tim Buntel, DevOps Advocate, XebiaLabs 

With greater investments being made in DevOps, management will demand more evidence of ROI. Teams will need to build their ability to measure DevOps ("DevOps Intelligence") based on a combination of global measurements (not just a single team or individual) and outcomes (delivery of software with speed and stability).

The call for security to “Shift Left” will become better understood and more effective in practice. In 2018, Shift Left was often misused as a way to shift blame for insecure software to developers. In 2019, DevSecOps will become just another natural aspect of DevOps, where security is built into the process at every phase and is everyone's responsibility.

T.J. Randall, Vice President of Customer Success, XebiaLabs 

DevOps is about people, process and tools. For any DevOps initiative, the people and process need to come first to deliver the most value. In 2019, we will see enterprises place increasing emphasis on fostering a culture of shared responsibility for delivering across the complex application pipelines. These teams require visibility into collaboration and progress. For the initiatives to succeed, the key is to share the results of the effort with the company as a whole, as the projects progress. After all, there are few better ways inspire the teams than with evidence that their efforts are delivering key results. 

Self-service deployment will gain steam in 2019, as deployment automation becomes a standard practice across enterprises, and as organizations come to realize that security and compliance can be built into their delivery process.

Mark Levy, Director of Strategy, Micro Focus

DevOps goes mainstream in the Enterprise. Bill Gates said, “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction.” While many have predicted the spread of Enterprise DevOps in the future, the current adoption has been slow as development and operations teams are still walled off in many IT organizations. The early adopters of Enterprise DevOps have proven that it accelerates the transformation to digital for companies, but what will it take for other companies to take action with the adoption of DevOps? As the economy accelerates in 2019, competitive pressures in the market are forcing enterprises to speed up their digital transformation projects. Paired with a competitive job market that is pushing enterprise IT to optimize and do more with less, CIOs and senior IT executives will be forced to support and standardize on Enterprise DevOps practices to avoid being disrupted.

Richard Whitehead, Chief Evangelist, Moogsoft

Finally resolving decades-old challenges. We've been hearing the same IT-related complaints for the last twenty years, and with the rise and implementation of AI technologies, we're finally able to circle back to those issues. The biggest wins we'll see for the industry next year is that we'll finally be able to resolve decades-old challenges in infrastructure observability and noise reduction.

Tim Eusterman, Senior Director, Solutions Marketing, BMC Software

The once-shiny object of ‘no-Ops’ has lost its luster. The quest for enterprise agility that assumed Dev could ‘do it all’ has run its course. In 2019, Ops will reassert its role in the DevOps team with a reinvigorated focus on key values by baking governance, production orchestration, stability and scalability into the cake before it gets put into the oven. We suspect Dev will be delighted to have Ops back.

They call it a speed-bump for a reason – DevOps has proven to be a critical element in helping today’s businesses digitally transform. But one area where DevOps teams still struggle is the Dev-to-Ops handoff into production. Why? Because it’s still too manual. 2019 will be the year when adding jobs-as-code to the front end of the software delivery lifecycle will go mainstream. Taking this simple, powerful approach of coding automation instrumentation along with the business logic and infrastructure-as-code, then running it all through the CI/CD toolchain, will help DevOps teams blow by the manual speed-bump into production. Get ready to run fast with no pit stops.

Turn out the lights, the party’s over! That’s a slight exaggeration, but 2019 will be the year when the field narrows down to a leader and a couple of contenders in each stage of the software development lifecycle. The reason is simple: DevOps teams like choice, and as the tools mature they will know which ones they like. Winners also get the benefit of the ecosystem rallying behind their cause (who doesn’t like a winner?). And finally, enterprise architects get some well-deserved street cred when they say "governance matters."

Corey Scobie, SVP of Product and Engineering, Chef Software

Compliance, the enemy of velocity -- How to avoid compromising innovation and demotivating top teams by eliminating the compliance wall. Application innovation often hits a hard wall – compliance considerations – on the way to production. As a result, 2019 will be the year when security and compliance teams themselves will be under tremendous pressure from the broader organization to get on board with the compliance automation process and stop being perceived as obstructionists. IT leaders in 2019 must accelerate the implementation of compliance automation processes and platforms, to eliminate any barriers to productivity quickly and easily, optimizing outcomes for enterprises and their customers.

Solving for the Enterprise Paradox (Hyperscale vs. Enterprise) -- Enterprises in 2019 will recognize the criticality of contractual clarity and consistency between layers and begin creating a software assembly line to future-proof their businesses. Recognizing that they tend to develop software, and dev processes, in silos, by group, while hyperscalers optimize for output, enterprises will place the focus squarely on aiming for consistency in development and delivery at scale. In order for enterprises to compete with hyperscalers, they have to think like hyperscalers and organize like hyperscalers.

Bridging the Confidence Gap -- Hyperscalers have legacy systems too, they call them their product. Leaders will move past their self-imposed limitations. In competing with Hyperscalers, many enterprises have failed to recognize that Hyperscalers, too, have legacy. In contrast to enterprises, who see legacy as a hindrance to forward progress, Hyperscalers just see it as their genesis and something they have iterated on to get to where they are. Leading enterprises in 2019 will come to see their current state in the same way, and champion the developments that have moved them beyond where they were.

Effortless Infrastructure -- Making infrastructure effortless, immediate, scalable and secure for apps teams. IT in 2019 will truly begin making infrastructure effortless for apps teams to do their jobs. The tools already exist to make that happen, they are just not applied consistently and effectively across the board. Closing this gap is critical to digital transformation and to enterprise ability to compete with Hyperscalers, and 2019 will be there year where we begin to see marked advancements along that path.

IT vs. Product -- Eliminating the gap and eradicating silos for business success. It’s all a technology problem. Too many companies have learned to keep IT and product teams at a distance. Silos like these indicate lack of ability to identify as a technology company and see everything as a technology-addressable problem. Leading IT teams in 2019 will eradicate walls and silos, leading to more creative, effective problem-solving and to better outcomes for companies and their customers.

Eliminating Complexity with Application Automation -- New tools and perspectives will ease application build, deploy, manage cycles when compared to Kubernetes, et al. Though much has been said about the efficacy of container management platforms in enabling cloud migration and multi-cloud app deployment and management, barriers still exist. That said, 2019 will be the year when more complete solutions around container orchestration will emerge and customers who are already agile will be able to derive real ROI from these solutions, while those who were just tinkering with Kubernetes as a “tool” rather than tying it to business outcomes will fail to achieve meaningful results. New approaches that streamline processes toward the core issue (app dev, deployment and management in any environment) will serve as a critical, complementary component to DevOps and IT strategies and separate the winners from the losers on enterprise leadership in the new year.