Predictions for DevOps in 2017

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Tan Moorthy, Head of Global Services for Application Development and Maintenance at Infosys, to discuss what they see as the future for DevOps in the coming year based on their experience with a Global 2000 market.

Tan has four predictions which differ slightly from those of executive I recently interviewed for DZone’s DevOps Research Guide:

The next phase of DevOps will focus on security: In 2017, building security practices as code will be part of application development, rather than enforcing it post-facto. This will lead to DevOps going beyond Dev, QA and Ops, to also including security as part of DevOps team. We are already seeing this emergence in the DevSecOps model.

Containerization goes mainstream: On the technology front, we will see increasing popularity of containerization solutions like Docker because of its ability to provide consistent environment from development to production. Next year it will be more popular with non-production environments, and as it matures it will see similar popularity for production environments. One of the key reasons for this popularity is its portability across multi-cloud platforms.

DevOps will extend into pay-as-you-go: We will see more cloud implementations of DevOps to meet the needs for an on-demand model. Technology solutions which orchestrate across cloud providers will only accelerate that adoption by eliminating the risk of cloud provider locking. Customers can easily switch over to a low-cost provider and benefit from the elastic nature of the cloud pricing model.

DevOps will move to the enterprise: The next phase of DevOps will see an increased adoption from large enterprises. So far large enterprises have been experimenting with DevOps in discrete projects. But they have started to plan for employing DevOps principles at enterprise-level, and we will see this roll out next year.

I spoke with 16 executives at 14 different companies who had a slightly different perspective on the evolution on DevOps in the coming year:

The greatest opportunities for the future of DevOps are:

• Continued growth of the cloud. There’s a healthy symbiosis between DevOps and the Cloud as AWS, Red Hat and Azure grow, DevOps will grow exponentially. 

• Tools facilitate automation. AWS is providing more tools to facilitate automation while helping to consolidate tools so you don’t have to custom-build deployments.

• Containers become more important automating the flow through the cloud reducing friction for everyone in the process – developers, QA, testing, and operations.

• Company-wide collaboration. DevOps is affecting all aspects of the organization by promoting communication and collaboration among developers, operations, QA, security, testing, deployment, and business planning to provide a better user experience. Senior management is seeing, and hearing about, the positive effects of DevOps and is interested in seeing the methodology implemented throughout the organization.

What do you anticipate evolving for DevOps in the coming year?