The Future of DevOps: 5 Predictions for 2021

Govind Malviya
5 min readJan 29, 2021

New technologies in the field of IT have emerged dramatically in the last few years. Cutting edge technology has made its way into the systems of numerous organizations across the globe.

New management techniques, technologies, or development strategies have been replaced by old ones making them obsolete within a few years of their launch.

However, DevOps is one such combination of practices and tools that have emerged as quite a champion. It has the proven ability to help organizations develop applications and deliver services at a much faster pace.

DevOps — The New Culture Uniting Operations and Development Practices

Let us look at how DevOps combines and unites the operations and the development practices in the software world.

  • It is the beginning of a new culture that automates the tasks of Dev to QA to solve conventional problems with the help of Prod, Ops, Monitoring. This group is known as DevOps.
  • The main goal of DevOps is to support the gap between development and operations to enhance collaboration and communication and create seamless processes, align strategy, and assign objectives for fast and efficient delivery.
  • The lifecycle management of DevOps automates tasks like coding, planning, building, testing, releasing, deploying, monitoring, and operating. The DevOps framework and culture is built in such a way that it is rendered autonomous.
  • The future of DevOps is secured due to the effective ways and speed with which it can deliver services. This makes it a coveted tool for every software company that wishes to cater to clients’ needs and demands.

Let us explore a framework that can analyze the company’s capability to adopt DevOps and measure success when it undergoes the DevOps Transformation — CALMS Model.

What is the CALMS Model in DevOps

The framework for DevOps is known as the CALMS model, which was created by John Willis and Damon Edwards in 2010. They are the authors of the DevOps Cafe Podcast.

CALMS is an abbreviation of -

  • C for Culture — It addresses people and supports change and experimentation.
  • A for Automation — It ensures continuous delivery and has infrastructure as code.
  • L for Lean — It aims to produce value for the ultimate user by using small batches.
  • M for Measurement — It measures anything and shows improvements at the same time.
  • S for Sharing — It leaves no room for miscommunication among different departments of DevOps.

Before proceeding with the predictions, let’s find out what the future of DevOps looks like.

What is The Future of DevOps

  • DevOps ranks 7th as it is becoming harder to fill the staff positions in the IT industry. This is because of a high demand gap and the unavailability of trained and skilled professionals in DevOps.
  • Recent statistics show that the DevOps tools market had achieved 5.2 billion dollars in 2018, and it is anticipated to reach around 15 billion dollars in 2023.
  • Organizations are moving towards DevOps technologies, which has led to an increase of up to 17% in 2018 compared to a 10% increase in 2017, as per the report from Statista.
  • DevOps future trends might include the increased deployment of using microservices and the implementation of mesh architecture to manage and monitor microservices. Going forward, tech professionals might need to develop a proper understanding of service mesh architecture, which is necessary for their working environment and also for choosing the right tool for their technology needs.
  • As more advancement occurs in DevOps, ultra-fully managed models would take over the current PaaS (Platform as a Service) model. Moreover, we cannot tell what may come after SaaS (Software as a service), but we can anticipate a shift in the deployment model to cloud providers as a possibility.
  • We can say that the future of DevOps models runs parallel to server-less computing. You need to determine the applications of server-less computing and its use in a distributed environment. Using this integration, the DevOps teams can help their organizations with strategic decision making and digital transformations.

5 Predictions For DevOps That Will Shape 2021

1. Multi-cloud and hybrid infrastructures.

In recent years, there has been an increase in the mix of cloud services that have led to Hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures. As a result, companies should devise unique DevOps strategies for the latest application deployments and collaboration processes.

Some of the DevOps tools used by organizations should be reliable and have the ability to deploy code to the private, public, and hybrid clouds and reputed global service providers like HPE, Amazon Web services, Google, and many more.

2. Development of DataOps.

Data managers are faced with the problem of more requirements with the development of DataOps. It helps streamline the management process to maximize the value of large amounts of data stored by the company.

DataOps is also called a process-oriented methodology that improves cross-functional communication and automation of data flow among different stakeholders from the network edge to multi-cloud platforms. Also, it connects data consumers to data creators to increase digital Innovation and collaboration.

3. Focus on Automation.

By focusing more on automation, it permits businesses to work faster than on the cloud; automation is highly evident in the hybrid environments in the cloud.

In recent years, machine learning and Artificial Intelligence have been offering new automation power to DevOps; automation has remarkably changed the IT operations and made the DevOps development process much simpler.

4. Code will become a must.

Since DevOps is adopted by a lot of organizations, the requirement for DevOps engineers has gone up. As technology is moving at a faster pace, rapidly changing technologies and businesses, need to Develop and maintain DevOps skills.

Testers are in high demand in DevOps as they know how to code and automate scripts; testers should learn how to code with automated scripts as the manual testing takes more time.

Automation not only makes sure the market gets the features faster, but it also helps in boosting the testing process.

5. Security will play an important role.

Security plays an important role in DevOps; the increase in automation only means more chances of problems occurring, which implies that the more connected we are, the more we will be exposed to the rest of the web world.

However, DevOps is constantly updating, and it is being adopted globally with a focus on IoT, cloud computing, and security.

Conclusion

To summarize, DevOps’ future in the IT industry looks promising; several organizations are adopting DevOps methodologies. The latest trends of 2021 show that DevOps can be considered a niche area of development and sought after by professionals.

As we can see, the DevOps culture has not only transformed the traditional SDLC to DevOps lifecycle management but also offered several benefits to its users. By the end of 2021, most organizations would have started using DevOps to tackle the challenge of developing effective, efficient, and innovative applications.

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