Trends that will boost the NextGen DevOps

Back in 2007, a Belgian engineer named Patrick Debois, frustrated by the friction between developer and operations teams, started using Agile techniques in development, project management, and system administration. He coined the phrase DevOps, a portmanteau of development and operations.

By 2012, DevOps became a buzzword riding on increasing automation in software lifecycles, and by 2014, the industry witnessed wide adoption of DevOps as many organizations started with CI/CD adoption but only for specific pilots or few digital applications. Advancement in tools and open-source technologies further aided the build, test, deploy and release automation. Most of the digital portfolios have already adopted CICD automation. The 2021 edition of the annual State of DevOps report by Puppet noted that DevOps has evolved to the point that “many of the teams that are ‘doing DevOps’ well don’t even talk about DevOps anymore—it’s simply how they work.”

The next step for the organizations was to scale this DevOps adoption beyond digital applications and take it to enterprise scale.

Trending – Enterprise Scale DevOps

Enterprise-scale adoption will be the flavour of DevOps in 2022. It will piggyback on higher maturity of CI/CD adoption, Cloud DevOps, and trigger people transformation in terms of unified DevOps teams and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). 

Higher maturity of CICD across the value stream

While many web applications show higher speed to value, resilience, reliability, and quality, the end benefits for businesses do not reflect the same because other systems in the value stream, which don’t implement DevOps drag down the benefits delivered by web applications. Ensuring DevOps is implemented across the value stream from backend to middleware to frontend online systems ensures its benefits are multiplied. 

This higher maturity of CI/CD adoption will involve DevOps for all technologies across the enterprise, beyond just web applications, including DevOps for packages like Salesforce, SAP, or other commercial off-the-shelf products.

Cloud DevOps

One of the important innovations in the space as a response to the increase in cloud adoption across the industry will be Cloud DevOps. Cloud DevOps services help enterprises maximize the core cloud benefits of scalability, reliability, and resiliency. 

DevOps needs to respond to this rapid cloud adoption, and it must be executed in parallel to the migration of applications to the cloud. Many parameters which decide the benefits of cloud adoption and DevOps need to be evaluated early on which includes cloud services vs. tools, cloud sticky DevOps vs. cloud-agnostic DevOps, application infrastructure automation and adoption of few DevOps practices even at on-premise. If DevOps is taken up as an afterthought, it could delay or reduce the real benefits of DevOps and moving to the cloud.

People transformation

It is also likely that people transformation for DevOps may see an uptick in 2022. DevOps was born out of the philosophy of development, test, and operations teams working together, however, its initial adoption was largely concentrated around CI/CD automation. CI/CD automation is enabling faster releases, creating new challenges for Ops teams and hence unified DevOps teams and SRE are becoming essential for fast-moving applications. Of course, the people transformation may be taken up selectively due to constraints in terms of the ability of teams to take up the new role or the ability of stakeholders to support such a change in an organization. 

DevSecOps 

Finally, we are also looking at security as an integral part of DevOps since it continues to remain a prime concern for organizations. DevSecOps offers continuous security and shifts left of security to ensure security is not compromised with faster releases.

NextGen DevOps

DevOps will remain an integral part of the software life cycle as more and more tools and platforms become available for DevOps along with enhancements in existing capabilities. 

And since DevOps is now mainstream and widely adopted, NextGen DevOps will employ automation with AI and more proactive mechanisms to accelerate the entire value stream by implementing DevOps for all technologies including legacy, packages, cloud, and implementing DevSecOps. 

The NextGen DevOps services will help enterprises modernize their landscape so they can become agile and innovate faster even in turbulent markets. The idea is to achieve no-touch automation to improve reliability, repeatability, quality, security, and speed while bringing about a holistic change that transforms people, processes, and technology.

The article has been written by Anupama Rathi - AVP, Head of DevOps practice, Infosys