devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: predictions

DevOps 2024: DevOps Isn’t Dead; Long Live DevOps

Well, it has been quite the year in general and quite the year as it relates to DevOps. As I sit here on the cusp of the 10th year of publishing devopsy.kinsta.cloud, I look back and recognize how much DevOps has grown, evolved, matured and shifted over time. As was the case 10 years ago, there are those who say DevOps does not work or insist that DevOps is dead. My response:

“They stab it with their steely knives
But they just can’t kill the beast.”
~ Eagles, Hotel California

No, it seems you can’t kill DevOps. Much like Obi-Wan Kenobi being struck down by Darth Vader, DevOps, it seems, is more powerful than ever. It has seeped into the very fabric of IT.

While cloud native has become the dominant form of computing, the fact is you really would not have cloud-native stacks without DevOps fundamentals enabling them. As cloud-native continues to grow, so does DevOps.

One of the interesting things about DevOps is the fact that it really has become an enterprise toolset. While initially scaling DevOps across an organization was challenging (and still is for many), it has become much more common to see large enterprises—or ‘horses,’ as Gene Kim would call them—adopting DevOps methodologies across significant parts of their IT teams.

Speaking of Gene Kim, some have pointed to his recent announcement that he’s changing the name of his DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES) to Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit as evidence of DevOps’ demise. We will be interviewing Gene on Techstrong.TV the first week in January 2024 and will address this with him, so stay tuned. But without giving out too many spoilers, Gene felt that DOES had expanded beyond just DevOps to encompass a general technology discussion (hey, AI will be in there for sure) aimed at technology leaders (C-suite). But rest assured that Gene Kim does not think DevOps is dead.

Looking ahead to 2024, I see DevOps making broad inroads into the SMB and mid-enterprise market. The DevOps toolset and methodology have matured to the point where it can be adopted and used successfully in IT environments not as resource-rich or process-driven as large enterprises generally are.

Another continuing story in DevOps is DevSecOps. Security and/or quality continues to be a key driver for DevOps pipelines, with the software supply chain and SBOM security still driving lots of adoption and adaptation.

Did I mention AI? You can’t discuss much today without mentioning it, or so it seems. AI is a catalyst for automation. Generally, in software development and deployment, where there is automation, you guessed it—there is DevOps.

But here is one out of left field for you: ITSM. It seems like IT service management is making a big comeback (some say it never left). Today’s ITSM incorporates many DevOps fundamentals to increase scale and agility. On this front, stay tuned; in partnership with PeopleCert, the folks behind ITIL, Prince 2 and the DevOps Institute, we will roll out a series of virtual events in 2024, tying all three of these key technologies together.

So, there’s lots going on in the DevOps world for 2024. You can count on us here at Techstrong Group to keep you in the know.
On that note, this will close out our coverage for 2023. To all of our readers, watchers, listeners, friends, sponsors and contributors, a Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and here is to a healthy and prosperous 2024.

December 26, 2023
DevOps 2023: The View From the Rearview Mirror

How can this be? Here we are, right before Christmas, and it will be a new year before we know it. Time to put 2023 in our rearview mirrors. I, for one, say, good riddance. I’m sorry, but 2023 will not go down as a great year for me, and I think it was a tough year for many of our friends in the tech world, too. In fact, to quote Queen Elizabeth (who we lost in 2022), for me, 2023 was in many ways an annus horribilis.

I say that because 2023 saw the sometimes-savage impact of the cycles of the market up close. For the first time in a long time, many of our friends and colleagues were the victims of layoffs. In fact, according to Crunchbase, over 191,000 U.S.-based tech workers were the victims of layoffs. That doesn’t include non-U.S.-based workers, which could easily drive that number to over a quarter of a million. That is on the heels of 2022, when about half that number of workers were laid off. So, in the last two years we have seen 350,000 or so tech workers laid off. For many of these folks, finding their next gig was not as easy as it was in the past. There weren’t recruiters breaking down their doors with interview opportunities. Employers became more selective and demanding. If you are looking for a job that is 100% remote so you can work from wherever, that gets much harder. Employers want employees in the office again. Probably every one of you reading this was either laid off at some point in the last two years or you know someone who was. But it wasn’t just the layoffs. The very foundation of our tech infrastructure suffered seismic shocks, too.

For many of us, the Silicon Valley Bank failure in March was a splash of cold water in the face that signaled business as usual was no longer going to be business as usual. I have been in tech for 30+ years, and for much of that time, SVB was a mainstay of venture-backed startups. Most of the venture-backed companies I helped found were customers. If they could fail, who and what else was suspect? We soon found out what else was not as rock solid as we had led ourselves to believe. The entire VC ecosystem that the tech world relied upon was shaken to its core. With the unprecedented rapid rise in interest rates by the Fed, the underlying business fundamentals of the tech VC market were broken. Who would take a risk investing in non-profitable startups when you could get tax-free bonds that paid as much, guaranteed? We actually saw VC funds close up shop, not raise new funds and cut back. This resulted in over 3,200 venture-backed companies failing in 2023. For those companies who held on, many received the message from their boards that they shouldn’t expect to raise more money at “up valuations” until sometime in 2024 or beyond. They should hold on to their cash. It seems reasonable, but you know, with VCs, there are always two sides (or more) to the coin.

These companies are usually not profitable. They burn money every month. When they cut, they do so first with marketing and sales, and generally, their growth slows. Slow growth makes it difficult to raise funds at an increased valuation. So, it becomes a death spiral. They aren’t growing enough to raise money at a decent valuation, but they are being told to shut down the marketing spend. It’s a Catch-22.

In addition to all the macroeconomic news, 2023 was also a year where war seemed to be breaking out everywhere. I am reminded of the old saying, “War is not healthy for children and other living things.” It isn’t great for tech either, as it turns out. Especially when those war zones are also in places that support thriving tech economies.

So, besides macroeconomic slumps and wars, what else can we say about 2023? In terms of DevOps, we saw a year where DevOps seemed to move from front-and-center to blending in. I think most organizations today are using some sort of CI/CD process in terms of developing and deploying software. Many of the fundamentals of DevOps have seeped into the very fabric of our IT infrastructure. Some may see this as “the death of DevOps;” heck, even Gene Kim is renaming DOES into something else. But as I will explain in my next article, the rumors of DevOps’ demise have been greatly exaggerated. To the contrary, DevOps is beginning to see its promise fulfilled. You will have to read my next blog to get more of my views on this topic.

But 2023 (like all black clouds) also had a silver lining. As Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate said (sort of), I have two words for you: AI. With all due respect to Taylor Swift, my Person of the Year was not really a person at all. I would say it’s AI. You could not swing a golf club around tech people in 2023 without hitting AI in the head. AI has the potential to be a civilization-changing technology. On par with the internet itself, the cellphone and the like, AI could change the lives of everyone. This is as opposed to technologies like the cloud or methodologies like DevOps that were technology-market-changing. AI is attracting literally billions of dollars in investments and is moving forward at warp speed, in spite of those who say it should slow down. It promises to invade and disrupt every corner of IT as well as one business vertical after the next. A perusal of our Techstrong.ai site will give you all you need to know. The impact of AI on DevOps is just starting to be understood. Operationalizing AI for IT will be a major theme for us here at Techstrong in the year ahead, so stay tuned.

While 2023 has been a difficult year in tech, the great thing about cycles is they cycle through. What went down will come up. We are already starting to see signs of an uptick. I am personally optimistic that 2024 will be a great year for the tech world and I pray for the world in general with fewer wars, less death and less sickness. How about more peace, more commerce, more goodwill, better health and, of course, more DevOps?

Happy holidays and happy new year to all of our Techstrong community!

December 22, 2023
Predictions 2020: 7 DevOps Predictions Shaping 2020
2019 was an exciting year for DevOps practitioners, with DevOps adoption continuing to grow at a fast pace. Most organizations were either executing or evaluating their DevOps strategies. So, what is 2020 going to bring in DevOps, infrastructure and application automation? Here are seven DevOps predictions for emerging trends in the new year.

Customer Experience

CX will become the guiding light of the DevOps journey, and not necessarily just technology. This is a big mindset shift from the early days of pure-technologist enthusiasm. As DevOps matures, we have to remind ourselves that it’s all about making business faster, not just the cool tech.

Take advantage now:
- Tie DevOps achievements to business needs and results to get executive buy-in and budgets.
- Successful QA teams will start looking at their role as guardians of customer experience and not just testers.
Trust

Everyone will be talking about trust—not only in the context of zero trust networks but also in the context of making it possible for Dev and Ops to trust one another as the foundation for DevOps.

Take advantage now:
- Proactively invest in creating a culture of trust. Identify causes for lack of trust in your value stream and make trust a 2020 goal.
- Encourage product-level conversation and define methodology and ownership when it comes to value stream management, application and infrastructure automation. It is the foundation that everyone is working on.
- Invest in staging environments—Staging environments are needed to ensure things work before you put them in production. For many of us, jumping directly to automatically deploying to production is a big step. The risk can be mitigated by investing in staging environment automation, which will be the first step toward deployment to production.
Value Stream

The DevOps toolchain is going away. In 2020 we will think value stream. The industry is maturing beyond the notion of chaining together dozens of open source tools and trying to make it work together. In previous years many felt comfortable saying that if they have a CI system in place it means they “do DevOps.” This is no longer the case. DevOps is not just CI, and DevOps cannot be established in silos. Mature DevOps needs to take into consideration the entire value stream—from planning a new capability and the business requirement, all the way to the customer getting more value and a wonderful experience.

In 2019, Gartner announced it’s the last year of the ARO MQ, as it’s not the right perspective. In 2020 we finally gain a system-level view on the value stream. More players are announcing end-to-end value stream management including Atlassian’s new Forge platform, GitLab and CloudBees. Companies are maturing and adopting system-level solutions.

Take advantage now:
- Plan for platform operations. System-level value stream perspective requires roles that take ownership of orchestration and automation throughout the value stream and not just in silos.
The SRE Role Will Continue to Mature

The SRE role that started with Google bringing software development practices into Operations will continue to evolve. Increasing volume, velocity and variety of data will make AIOps solutions thrive. Also, increasing levels of automation will require smart ways to handle dynamic infrastructure and applications without losing control, and being able to track changes all the way back to the coder.

Take advantage now:
- If you haven’t implemented the SRE role yet, consider how SREs can be part of your teams in 2020. Define SRE areas of responsibility and KPIs, and how the SREs communicate with the teams. Is it a centralized position or are the SREs part of the team?
- Make sure you provide SREs with the tools they need to succeed including:
  - What are the observability solutions you use? Who uses them today? How do you analyze it and how is it communicated?
  - What are the production environment orchestration, deployment and configuration tools that you use today? How do you connect them to application and infrastructure automation that happens before production?
Seamless Infrastructure

We will have to make infrastructure seamless for our teams. Internal customers are also customers, and their experiences will be just as important. Self-service and empowering teams will be the main themes in the bridges that need to be built between Dev and ITOps. Public cloud, Kubernetes and serverless technologies will grow. And while it makes automation more feasible than ever, the emphasis will shift to self-service and to the end users. With more companies adopting similar approaches, the need to develop internal expertise will decrease, and we will see more off-the-shelf solutions.

Take advantage now:
- Map how infrastructure is used throughout your value stream, and work on unifying the approach in product-level.
- Make sure you build self-service solutions with strong focus on the end-user in order to enable and balance both speed and control. Make sure developers and ITOps are equally represented when determining an approach to infrastructure automation.
Infrastructure Automation

Infrastructure automation is going to get smarter, with a lot of AI and ML. Making sure automation is properly governed will also increasingly be important. Take into consideration security and compliance, as well as cost.

Take advantage now:
- Assess infrastructure automation practices throughout your value stream. Who builds the automation? What teams and systems consume it? How do you enforce security best practices (e.g. no passwords in public repositories, using proper data sets for testing, compliance of automation blueprints)? How do you enforce cost control (e.g. tagging, reviewing cloud spend reports)?
- Invest in control mechanisms before you lose control, especially in public cloud automation. If you don’t have governance in place, look at baking governance into automation, rather than adopting traditional cloud management approaches. Invest in automatic de-commissioning of infrastructure, automatic tagging, analysis of infrastructure consumption data and connecting it back to the business requirement, secrets and key management and access control.
SaaS

Open source is nice. SaaS is great. While big open source projects set the pace (K8S, Github) and are strongly backed up and funded by the industry’s giants, smaller projects are increasingly difficult to scale and glue together, especially when trying to assure enterprise readiness. The need to “do it yourself” is gradually fading, as more vendors offer products and services for supporting DevOps with clear business and support models and, as important, with OOB integrations with the ecosystem. Just Rest API is no longer enough.

Take advantage now:
- If your enterprise-readiness requirements make it difficult for you to scale DevOps initiatives, consider evaluating new SaaS offerings that eliminate much of the heavy-lifting and gluing that were typical to the skills-heavy early-days implementations. If you were concerned with security, cost and skill requirement, today you can find tools that are purpose-built to support DevOps for enterprise at scale. The good news is that most of the vendors are well-aware of the criticality of integrating to your ecosystem, making it easier to achieve your end-to-end value stream vision.
Want to learn more about what to expect in 2020? Join us Jan. 23 for our Predict 2020 Virtual Summit featuring discussions from some of the industry’s best and brightest offering up their visions for the future. Sign up today for this free daylong virtual event.

— Maya Ber Lerner
December 24, 2019
DevOps Predictions for the Future
Among the few powerful trends we had experienced in the recent times, one is undoubtedly the adoption of DevOps practices. As we are move closer to 2018, it is becoming more obvious that DevOps is becoming mainstream, with many large organizations getting on board with DevOps.

DevOps Within Enterprises

DevOps is becoming the standard way of working for businesses. Adoption of DevOps within the organization is rising on a broader scale, and businesses are trending toward it.

Enterprises of today are well-aware of the trending technology services in modernizing environments. DevOps is growing its recognition due to changes in complexities of today’s software that lies more in the diverse set of operation systems and platforms. It is less about doing things a particular way and more about moving the business forward and turning technology into a strategic advantage.

DevOps builds upon best practices to help drive enterprise performance in the modern digital economy. It offers organizations a new way to deliver value to their customers quickly. An increasing number of businesses are recognizing the power that DevOps can bring for operational efficiency and overall performance.

DevOps Key Trends

As businesses are trending toward DevOps adoption, let’s look at the changing landscape and key trends in DevOps, along with its trajectory.

Some of the DevOps trends include:
- Many organizations will challenge agile and recognize DevOps as the new ALM methodology.
- Many DevOps automation tools are going to roll up.
- Automation and testing would gain their prominence.
- DevOps Engineers are highest paid IT practitioners today.
- Testing and deployment are done more frequently as Ops people are getting their DevOps knowledge in production for testing and automation operations.
DevOps Predictions

Based on the market so far, here are my predictions for the future of DevOps.

Adoption of Microservices and Containers

Several software enterprises are pushing toward microservices infrastructure. Microservices architect an enterprise solution, independently, over a set of services.

Microservices are best-suited for DevOps due to its features including:
- Isolated nature
- Improvised cycle times
- Well-defined interfaces
- Aligned architecture
Containerization also is growing in popularity. Containers are designed to run one process at a time with minimal deployment, serving as an ideal deployment model. According to one study, 50 percent of enterprises are expected to run containers in production by the end of 2018.

If an enterprise has decided to leverage microservices and containers, it is highly essential to incorporate solutions that support microservices and containers along with traditional application model.

Culture, the Top Prerequisite

Culture is the key differentiator for DevOps. Culture and process are the principal paths for the successful DevOps journey. Culture breaks down the organizational silos and encourages integration across all the groups that need to work together to achieve a great business outcome. Implementing DevOps culture makes an organization achieve success easier. It even enables continuous learning environment that will see bigger benefits.

Notion of Shifting Left

DevOps tools and solutions always prefer to shift left. DevOps orchestration tools automate from end to end, making traceability easier. Activities that are performed traditionally, at the later stages of development and release process, are making a shift to the left of the pipeline. The ultimate goal of it is to recognize issues earlier, along with performance and disaster recovery testing.

Downtime

Adopting DevOps holds a lot of benefits. For one, it enables enterprises to ensure uptime and enhance cadence and quality. High-performing IT organizations employing DevOps practices deploy 200 times more frequently than the low-performing enterprises. Similarly, they also enjoy faster recovery from failure and minimize downtime.

Collaboration of Big Data and DevOps

Big Data and DevOps are together taking a step forward toward the design of predictive analytics. DevOps has now become an expert in automating the process and automating configuration.

Consolidation is Critical

Large and complex organizations are focusing on consolidation and standardization of DevOps processes so as to scale DevOps within the enterprise. A shared and self-service DevOps automation enables end-to-end pipelines. Eventually, consolidation allows reusability, visibility, auditability and security.

Supporting Hybrid

“Hybrid-everything” makes DevOps solutions future-ready to support any tool, application and process in the hyper-hybrid state. “Hybrid” state of existence is achieved for infrastructure, architecture, release pipelines and more.

DevOps Monitoring

Until now, the focus has been on pre-production provisioning. However, more attention is being given to the post-deploy feedback loop. With the application of new architectures including microservices, new monitoring technologies and pricing models are effectively introduced.

Expansion of DevOps Across IT

DevOps is maturing in other areas such as database management, security and testing, all with the goal of application release.

Business-centric Agile

The development methodology approach is becoming more critical to the continuous integration and continuous delivery process.

DevOps Skills

People with DevOps skills are in demand in the industry and expected to proliferate as businesses are witnessing great results from DevOps. Organizations incorporating DevOps training practices are extremely high-functioning. If you aim to build your career in DevOps, below are certain notable skills.

Most common DevOps positions include:
- Site reliability engineer
- DevOps engineer
The core skills of DevOps are:
- Coding skills
- Knowledge of automation tools
- Communication skills
Roles of a DevOps Engineer

Many DevOps developers find interest in deployment and network operations. A core set of DevOps skills includes:
- Ability to code and script using various technologies and tools.
- Close relation with Systems and IT operations.
- Strong base of automation tools and its skills.
- Incremental code testing and deployment.
- Strong focus on data management skills and business outcomes.
Final Words…

DevOps skills will only continue to grow and DevOps is here to stay. Dev and Ops teams are increasingly moving to rapid development and reliable, high-performance services delivery.

DevOps is being adopted by more and more companies, particularly smaller enterprises. Many industries today are keen on incorporating DevOps and its key points into their respective departments. It will continue to evolve for the foreseeable future, by incorporating executives and other business units into it. Companies that utilize DevOps effectively will experience higher innovation and quality and easier adoption to other changing conditions.

Adoption of DevOps enables applications and technology solutions. It power businesses with faster and better quality. Investing in DevOps helps organizations better develop and release software.

About the Author / Sirisha Paladhi

Sirisha Paladhi is a content writer at TekSlate. During her career, she has written many articles on technology innovations.

LinkedIn URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paladhi-sirisha-74987881/
September 25, 2017
When Automation Predictions Come To Be: Transportation as a Service

Back in December of 2016 I wrote an article for devopsy.kinsta.cloud titled, “What Do We Do When Everything is Automated?” in which I made a prediction:

Also, think about this: As Uber and Lyft mature in the business landscape and self-driving cars become commonplace, the ride-share companies will replace human-driven vehicles with self-driving vehicles. Then, Uber or Lyft will start to offer a pricing model that is a flat fee for 24/7 service with unlimited mileage.”

Pretty brazen prediction, huh? Well not really. I thought and still do think that such a situation is inevitable. You just have to think things through to arrive at the conclusion I made above. However, my thinking was that, until yesterday, this sort of inevitability is about five years out. Then this news flash come in from Bloomberg: “Apple Is Working With Hertz to Manage Its Self-Driving Car Fleet”

This caught my eye. Hertz stock went up 14 percent that day. Upon further inspection, I learned that Apple is leasing a small fleet of cars from Hertz to test self-driving vehicles. Turns out the Alphabet Inc., a.k.a., Google, has a similar deal with Avis Budget Group Inc., a competitor to Hertz in the car rental space. Now granted, I thought that Uber or Lyft would extend the scope of their activity by working directly with automobile manufacturers making self-driving vehicles. That the service provider might be a current automobile rental company was a bit unanticipated. But, as I explored further, it gets interesting.

I turns out that Hertz previously was owned by Ford Motor Company, which sold the company to a private equity group in 2005 for $15 billion, a tidy sum. Hertz acquired Dollar Thrifty in 2012. Avis Budget Group, a competitor to Hertz, owns Zipcar as well as the New Zealand rental company, Apex Car Rental and Maggiore Group, the fourth largest car rental company in Italy. There’s a lot going on in the auto rental space.

As I reflect upon events, things become clearer. It makes sense that those non-automotive companies working to create driverless vehicles are attracted to car rental companies. Car rental companies are not in the automobile business. They are in the transportation service business. Few people go to Hertz to rent a Chevy. They go to rent a way to get around. If a customer shows up at the Hertz counter only to find out that there is no Chevy to be had, most people will take the Nissan alternative. They don’t care about the car. They care about the service the car provides.

Now imagine this: Let’s say you are a vehicle manufacturer, new to the marketplace. You finally figure out how to make a driverless vehicle that satisfies the needs of consumers under most driving conditions. Given current trends, when it comes time to make a profit from your investment, are you going to open showrooms with the hope of selling your new automotive brand to consumers? Or, are you going to buy an existing company that has a proven record success and infrastructure for providing transportation services on demand to the masses? In other words, what’s easier to imagine, Apple setting up showrooms throughout the world to sell autonomous vehicles to consumers accustomed to buying Ford, Toyota, Nissan or Tesla? Or, rather, Apple going directly into the autonomous transportation-on-demand business by buying Hertz? Or maybe Hertz will just buy driverless cars from Apple. (Hertz buying from Apple is hard to imagine; Apple is a company that likes to think big. Selling cars to Hertz is thinking small.)

My take? Well, two things: First, as autonomous vehicle technology matures, transportation as a service is going to grow on the landscape. Vehicle manufacturers need to survive. They will adapt. How the actual selling of vehicles fits into it all is still working itself out. I think we’re going to see a lot of vehicles being made to provider of service, not as a property to own. Second, maybe it’s time to buy some stock in Hertz, maybe Avis too, for that matter.

What do you think?

— Bob Reselman

June 29, 2017
DevOps in 2017: From Building to Executing

In 2016, DevOps grew in popularity and use, new tools were introduced and enterprises across industries realized the influence and benefits derived from agile development. But there are even more developments to look forward to as enterprises engage DevOps teams further.

Scaling-out solutions, providing a baseline for a new cultural approach to problems and continuous improvement will continue to be priorities. But there are a few items that we’ll likely see come to the forefront in the new year. In fact, 2017 should be an even more exciting year for DevOps.

Here are my top four predictions for what we can expect this year:

The next phase of DevOps will focus on security

Security was a perennial news event throughout 2016, and we can expect the same in 2017. However, DevOps teams likely will be challenged to build good security practices into code as a part of application development, rather than refining security post-facto. This will lead to DevOps, QA and operations bringing security teams deeper into the DevOps environment, if not outright incorporating them as a part of the team.

The foundations for this development were put in place in early 2016 as the DevSecOps model gained traction in cybersecurity circles throughout the year. In 2017, we’ll see DevSecOps teams build on these foundations. After all, every company is at risk for a data breach.

Containerization will go mainstream

The convenience of containerization makes it one of the most desirable technologies for DevOps teams, and next year we’ll see it gain even greater use. It’s easy to understand why: Containerization solutions, such as Docker, grant teams the ability to provide a consistent environment from development to production. We may even see containerization move to non-production environments over the course of 2017 due to its portability across multicloud platforms. And that portability is critical not just for production purposes but for security as well.

DevOps will extend into pay-as-you-go

DevOps will, almost by necessity, develop an on-demand model in 2017. Companies are realizing the stark demand for DevOps skills and they will be meted out according to internal needs and external demands.

In particular, we’ll likely see a lot of opportunity for DevOps in cloud implementation, since enterprises leverage solutions across cloud providers. With cloud provider “lock-in” still a real concern for many enterprises, any provider capable of operating cross-cloud development—thereby allowing customers to switch to a low-cost cloud provider—will be in high demand. This is good news for customers, as it allows them to finally benefit from the elastic nature of cloud pricing models.

DevOps will become pervasive across the enterprise

Finally, enterprises will use DevOps across the enterprise. Thus far, large enterprises have been experimenting with DevOps in discreet projects, but they have started to plan for employing DevOps principles at enterprise-level, and we will see this roll out next year.

Watching the Shift

Thus far, DevOps has been focused on adopting and orchestrating technology and tools to build automation pipelines. But moving ahead, we’ll witness DevOps change its focus from building to executing. With this industry development and the shift within DevOps to security and containerization at an enterprise level, we’ll begin the true potential of DevOps.

About the Author / Tan Moorthy

Tan Moorthy is Head of Global Services for Application Development and Management at Infosys, a next-generation IT services provider. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

January 9, 2017
DevOps in 2016: The Year of Implementation

DevOps is the default software delivery approach for modern IT organizations and hyperscale startups that have incorporated the culture into their everyday integration and delivery activities.

However, over the past year, these organizations have also started to recognize and acknowledge that there are challenges in certain aspects of the DevOps approach, including precarious security infrastructures, R&D team member burnout, and the need to close gaps between operations and development with dedicated personnel such as site reliability engineers (SREs).

In 2015, we saw larger enterprises beginning to migrate to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and sketch out their plans to incorporate agile and DevOps methodologies. The implementation process necessitates changing cultural norms, and incorporating new tools and organizational processes. And with DevOps’ great benefits, my prediction is that in 2016, these enterprises will move from the drawing board to implementation.

1. Companies will stop talking and start implementing. In 2016, DevOps culture will finally become mainstream (and not only for startups and tech-savvy companies) as more traditional enterprises jump on the bandwagon and start implementing real DevOps principles. IT leaders will need to figure out how to restructure their teams, adapt DevOps values, concepts and tools, and incorporate continuous integration and continuous delivery practices to do a better job of meeting user expectations of fast and agile delivery.

Having said that, traditional IT organizations that deal with sensitive data and tight change management processes — such as those in the health, finance, and some government sectors — cannot compromise their strict IT delivery standards, especially if they have to comply with security and compliance protocols. Therefore, 2016 will still be just the beginning for enterprise-grade DevOps implementation in several specific industries and verticals

2. SREs will bridge the gap. The growing movement of site reliability engineers (SREs) is being led by Google and has been introduced to the world as part of a practical and more mature DevOps adoption. SREs are software engineers who work in operations and are in charge of availability, change management, emergency response, and monitoring (among other things).

Even early DevOps adopters such as LinkedIn have begun looking for dedicated individuals to fill SRE positions, which require ops as well as code-level management skills. In 2016, we will see an increasing number of discussions on SREs as well as more job opportunities for them, making this new class of engineers key players in DevOps implementation.

3. High demand will mean high salaries. What we have seen within our company as well as among our customers is that dev and ops engineers with strong experience in working with and implementing DevOps are still a rare breed. As more and more IT leaders recognize the need to move to DevOps, the higher the demand and compensation will grow in 2016 for the limited number of experienced engineers.

According to Puppet, DevOps engineers make noticeably higher salaries than most other IT positions and 55% of U.S. DevOps engineers earn $100,000 per year or more. While large IT organizations are building their own education and training plans in anticipation of the move to DevOps, the demand for experienced engineers will still continue to grow in 2016 and beyond.

4. We will have more Big Data benchmarks. Over the past two to three years, the IT industry has embraced Big Data. Technologies such as Hadoop and MongoDB are commonplace now when it comes to extracting values from large data repositories. Today, companies in industries ranging from Adtech to online gaming to finance are already utilizing Big Data to enhance their core capabilities.

Over the past year, we saw the rise of more solutions that help with implementation and presentation that aid in generating insights and enhancing user experience. Beginning next year, these big data solution vendors will leverage their unique positions and advanced technologies (such as machine learning) as well as their vast amounts of data to create specific industry benchmarks and best practices that will ultimately enhance customer satisfaction.

5. Some companies will reverse-migrate to on-premise. Don’t get me wrong, we’ll still see AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and others continue to grow their user bases among next-gen companies as well as traditional organizations such as, the Guardian, which recently failed to build an OpenStack private cloud and consequently decided to go all-in with AWS.

However, companies that have been using the public cloud for the past year or two will see their cloud bills start to soar (if they haven’t already) and look around for cloud solutions that better meet their resource-utilization levels and business model. I think we’ll see more of this so-called “reverse cloud migration” as the cloud business matures in 2016. This is actually a sign that this market is maturing and that people are past the super-hype phase and seeing the pros and cons of the public cloud.

In Summary

Of course, no one can predict the future, but the events of 2015 may hint at what we will see in 2016 — and that points toward an increasing implementation of DevOps practices.

Some companies will manage to complete their DevOps cycles and have full-blown, continuous deployment straight to production. However, the majority will be challenged by even the basic implementation processes and needs such as which DevOps tools to use, how to reconstruct their organizations, and what state of mind to have.

Still, DevOps will eventually be the norm when it comes to software development and delivery — it is just a matter of time.

December 22, 2015