The future of DevOps and the major reasons to opt for it in 2023
DevOps
There's
more to DevOps than methodology. According to a recently released report from
Forrester, future DevOps success will require organizations to undergo a
mindset shift—embracing new tools, technologies, and practices that support
teams working together toward a common goal. DevOps represents the blending of
software development and IT operations into a single, collaborative unit. Since
its inception in the late 2000s, it has come to dominate how software moves
from development into production. “DevOps has become the default approach for
most software-intensive organizations and is having an increasing effect on
enterprise IT operating models,” reads Forrester's 2022 "Future of
DevOps" report, released in June. “Unlike many flash-in-the-pan,
hype-driven trends in IT, DevOps has made a real and sustained impact. It
continues to transform how organizations of all sizes write, deploy, and
operate software and produce digital value.” Before DevOps, software developers
simply handed off their work to IT and moved on to the next project. IT was
then left to figure out how to best run and maintain the software they were
given. This worked fine when applications were more or less static, changing
little year to year. With the rise of digitalization, developers and IT
staffers have struggled to meet increasingly demanding customer expectations
for new features and functionalities. “The idea that the computing system is an
ongoing, living, breathing service that is going to be continually
improved—that was absolutely the driver for DevOps,” said Forrester analyst
Charles Betz, co-author of the report. Although DevOps could be done in
isolation, it is often paired with both agile development and automated
continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines that rapidly
move finished code into production. Like DevOps, agile has been widely adopted
over the last decade to keep pace with end users' demands for change. Forrester
finds that this agile-plus-DevOps approach will continue to evolve over the
next five to 10 years, as companies identify new challenges and take creative
and collaborative approaches to solving them. DevOps is the automation of the
process in an organisation. The DevOps engineers carry out this process and to
carry forward the task, they understand various aspects of DevOps as well such
as its culture, philosophies, and tools. Most companies in today’s times use
DevOps to automate tasks. Companies like Netflix, Google, and Amazon use DevOps
to increase the productivity and efficiency of their teams. There are frequent
questions like ‘What is devops technology?’ so to answer that, the DevOps allows
for creating faster and smoother development of the apps. Also, the deployment
also becomes easier with the use of DevOps. It is a continuous process to take
out the last mile delivery. DevOps is a continuous process of delivery and
integration where automation can be executed. It makes sure to test, develop,
and operate by taking the lesser time. The changes that take place during
development, integration, automation, etc seem to be more stable. DevOps has
various processes attached to it such as coding to develop, building and
integration, ongoing testing, reporting the risks for better development,
configuration, monitoring, etc. There is a growing market for DevOps in today’s
time the market is expected to reach US$ 287.9 billion by 2026 (Source). There
are various roles and responsibilities that are available in the market for
DevOps professionals such as DevOps Engineer, Platform Engineer, Building
Engineer, Platform Engineer, etc. Devops engineer salary in the market is The salary of a DevOps engineer ranges from
4.2 lakhs to 12.3 lakhs and the average salary is 6.0 LPA (Source). So the apprehension ‘Is devops a good
career?’ gets answered.
Product
According
to Betz, product teams are persistent, outcome-focused, collaborative,
heterogeneous, and mostly autonomous. The “products” these teams are focused on
vary widely. They could be goods, services (either internally or externally
focused), ideas, methods, or anything else that “satisfies
a want.”
To
achieve this product focus, DevOps teams must be redefined by
purpose—rather than function—going forward. There are four such types of teams
(see teamtopologies.com):
·
Features
teams, which are business- and end user-aligned
·
Enabling
teams, which are tasked with coaching and internal consulting
·
Platform
teams, which service the features team developers
·
Complicated
subsystem teams, which are aimed at specialty products, such as mainframes and other
specialty hardware
Increasingly,
these teams will not be led in the traditional way. Organizations are
experimenting with collaborative leadership approaches that incorporate all the
different areas that make up a particular team.
People
At
its core, DevOps is about enabling collaborative problem solving using
technology. It is a comprehensive operating model that is focused on outcomes
instead of on processes. As such, teams can only get the most out of DevOps by
understanding that DevOps represents more than a process for managing the
handoff between developers and IT. In fact, for routine activities that are
highly prescriptive in nature, DevOps doesn’t help very much. “DevOps is about
people,” Betz said in the report. “High-trust cultures perform better, and
employees are more likely to endorse organizations that engage in
flow-promoting DevOps practices.”
Cybersecurity
and DevOps
As
cyber criminals continue their relentless assaults on organizations of every
size and pursuit, boardrooms around the globe are increasingly concerned with
cybersecurity. With more automation moving more code into production faster
than ever, ensuring that code is secure by design before it goes live is a
greater challenge than ever. Accordingly, DevOps-driven collaboration must
include security considerations. Because the future of DevOps lies in people
and collaboration, that future also lies partly in DevSecOps—where security is
built in from the earliest stages of application development and deployment.
According to the Forrester report, this early-stage collaboration between
security, developers and operations teams will increase overall security and
organizational agility.
Implementation
of DevOps should ensure the security of the product being developed in
production and even int the test environments. This stands as the governance
and codes of ethics of DevOps philosophy. DevOps must ensure security protocols
that ensure the application’s integrity and conformance with the security
policies of the company. Security is of the utmost importance for any
organization today. Data is central to businesses and they want to protect it
from any unauthorized access. The data could be either the company’s data or
the user’s which the organization does not aim to compromise with. DevOps is
also utilized to safeguard the application that is aligned with the terms and
conditions of the organization’s policies.
AI/ML
in the DevOps Framework
The
software development life cycle is revolutionized with the DevOps methodology,
cloud-native approach, and microservices architecture. DevOps integrates
testing and production environments, and developers get to see the problems
before applications go live. Applying AI and ML to the DevOps pipelines can
help you run builds and automation in a much better with closer insights a
control. People are moving from DevOps to DataOps and AIOps, which focus on the
use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to learn from logs and
monitoring metrics to drive the DevOps in a controlled fashion. Tools like
Moogsoft and BigPanda are market pioneers in AIOps that collect data from
different monitoring and logging systems, apply artificial intelligence to it,
and provide the engineer with more detailed insights and actionable data. Read
more about DevOps tools. DevOps is maturing with AI making like simpler for
developers, operations guys, and the DevOps engineers. Technology is getting
matured with each passing day, and AI/ ML brings a revolution in the digital
world. Artificial intelligence allows organisations to work with a huge volume
of data. The enormous amount of data can be scanned very quickly. The
configuration is done quickly reducing any scope of human-induced errors that
reduce the cost and increase productivity. There is a lot of scope in the AI/
ML industry where engineers can use the technology to increase the efficiency
of tasks. The AI/ ML in the DevOps can be used in quality checking, tracking
the progress of the application, increasing the security of productions, the
threats can be detected early by running processes or algorithms to prevent
damage to the process, and many more.
Automation
for Every Company
In
today’s world, everything happens over the internet. Most companies are
changing to be like IT company that provides some particular services. For
example, booking.com was a travel company that now functions as an IT company
that provides travel services. For every company, its software is the critical
element that brings in sales and business. Hence automation of software
deployment and infrastructure provisioning is key to all modern businesses. It
plays a crucial role in improving efficiency and bringing out the best
software. DevOps methodologies thus play a significant role in all modern
companies today. Automation of the software is becoming important to companies,
there are many advantages attached to it, for example, the reduction in errors.
In manual functioning, there are lot many scopes for errors that are
human-induced and those errors become a setback to the process where the time,
cost, or resources are over utilised. But automation reduces the scope of an
error where it saves time, effort, and cost, and utilise the resources well and
in the end, it enhances the productivity of the team. The automation increases
the feedback loops among development and operations teams. Because of this
feature, new features can be deployed faster which enhances the quality. The
automation allows the faster development of the products that address the
existing problem and quicker maintenance of the existing systems.
Container
Technology
Container
technology is evolving and emerging faster than before. Containers can be used
in various ways to provide different benefits. Containers can be used to
sandbox applications for security and resource constraints. Research is going
around using containers per user or user session. This idea brings a limitless
array of opportunities for improving user security, system security, and
performing user analytics. As containerization technology improves, containers
will become more cost-effective to deploy. All the software components are put
into one unit that is a container and this is what container technology is. And
this single container is used to run all the microservices to the large
services. And this container and unit hold everything such as codes, libraries,
configuration information, etc that are used for smoother deployment of the
software across the network. These containers are very lightweight that they
can be very easily deployed across the systems without adding any extra load.
These containers can be deployed to multiple operating systems as well. They
share the same host operating systems rather than requiring multiple operating
systems. This adds to another advantage of using container technology.
DevOps
and Focus on Integration Between Edge Services
The
traditional model of on-premises is clearly changing. In the last few years,
companies have moved to Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Database as a
Service (DBaaS), and Platform as a Service (Paas) solutions. With cloud
technologies pitching in heavily and containerization technologies going
widespread, DevOps has to play a significant role in the integration of all
these services that are hosted on different platforms. Public clouds are
gaining popularity and acceptance, and today, even traditional companies are
moving to cloud-based solutions because of the cost savings that they can
offer. Companies are now planning to use configuration management tools along
with container technologies to fully automate infrastructure provisioning and
management. This calls for a bright future for DevOps.
Job
as a Code
The
development-to-operations handshake is still a manual and tedious process. In
2019, it is expected that the DevOps philosophy would emphasize “jobs-as-code”
in the software delivery lifecycle. This could act as coding automation
instrumentation. This approach with the Infrastructure as a Code methodology
and CI/CD pipelines will help reduce the time gap for the
development-to-operations handshake.
Approach
Even
though DevOps is now the de facto standard for IT operations in many
organizations, there is still “far to go,” cautions Forrester. According to the
report, to achieve success in the days ahead, IT and software development
organizations will need to:
·
Stay
focused on the business outcomes and KPIs that matter to the organization, not
individual processes in isolation.
·
Shift
focus from methodology to organizational design and operating model to counter
the impacts on long-standing practices and governance.
·
Be
flexible and patient. There is no-one size fits all solution. Every DevOps
journey is as unique as the organization undertaking it.
·
Focus
on culture, not just methods and workflows. DevOps is as much about trust and
empowerment as it is about software development and IT operations.
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