Contributed article by Rajat Bhargava, co-founder and CEO of JumpCloud Inc.

Predictions in 2014 for DevOps and the Cloud

2013 seemed to be the year that DevOps has come into its own and get recognized as a serious movement. Here are some of our predictions on how that might continue into 2014.

1 - Enterprise will start to get on the DevOps bandwagon. Just as with Agile software development practices, large corporations are going to start seeing the benefits startups and small companies find with the DevOps movement and will want to capitalize on that themselves. We predict they will implement it with the speed and efficacy that they have when attempting to practice Agile, that is, not all that well. New projects will benefit earliest, as will re-systemization efforts: these will be easiest to automate operations tasks as they're built, similar to a startup environment. Legacy systems will be the most difficult to move to a DevOps mindset, and it will be an uphill battle to convince management to make the investment to make that change versus the status quo.

Also factor in entrenched and more traditional IT teams, who will be forced to change or lose their jobs entirely as barriers to DevOps in the enterprise.

2 - Rise of the (ephemeral) machines.  Immutable servers are a talking point we're hearing more of - a virtual system is spun up, configured using an automated configuration tool and let to run with minimal to no direct contact from operations. Some servers don't even have a way to login at all - they're completely autonomous. While this is attractive and useful for (some) production environments we think that it's fairly impractical for many companies. The ability to login, take measurements, experimentally tweak the environment and get instantaneous feedback is just too valuable -- not to mention that this approach basically just moves the configuration overhead from the running systems to the base image management. Nonetheless, expect to see more talk of immutable servers in the coming year.

3 - Companies will start outsourcing their DevOps. While the philosophy of DevOps is that the product does best when developers are intimately involved in the deployment and maintenance of the production environment this doesn't mean that they need (or want... or can be) experts in that area. There are companies coming into play which assist in this area - VictorOps in the area of 'pager duty', email delivery through 'SendGrid', continuous deployment strategies managed by companies like 'CodeShip', ongoing management of servers via JumpCloud, and monitoring via NewRelic. We've seen in the past decades the componentization of software - through open source libraries that allow companies to focus on their core competencies. Today, we're seeing the Internet continue that drive to increase productivity by not only relieving the need to code those functions, but by actually making massive scalable infrastructures available to programmers that they can use without worrying about how that infrastructure is maintained or scaled - if they can afford it.

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