
Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2018. Read them in this 10th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by CloudBees, Inc.
2018: DevOps & Beyond
DevOps - the term that is being talked about nonstop and the
future of enterprises. As we begin to near the end of 2017 and look towards the
future, what's the next hot topic and where is the industry headed in 2018?
The crew at CloudBees, Inc., the hub of enterprise
Jenkins and DevOps, has A LOT to say about where the industry is headed, from
metrics-based approaches with DevOps to DevSecOps and everything in between.
Monitoring and
Metrics
There has been a lot of conversation about DevOps adoption
and culture, but taking it to the next level means showing more measurement in
DevOps. Despite investments in agile methodologies and tools, enterprises have
difficulty measuring ROI and optimizing investments in DevOps initiatives. "Moving
towards a metrics-based approach with tools like DevOptics, which aggregates
live data from software pipelines to help derive essential metrics and insights
into a holistic view of application delivery, will in turn help enterprises
advance their DevOps initiatives," said senior product marketing manager
Bhavani Rao.
There will also be a larger shift in monitoring as it
becomes the new testing of the microservices world. "Testing in production-like
environments is expensive and the tests themselves tend to be unreliable and
slow. Establishing thresholds to determine when your services have started to
misbehave and monitoring for those thresholds allows you to be the first one to
know if something went wrong and be able to recover faster," said quality
engineering manager Isa Vilacides. Engineer Carlos Sanchez also agreed that "at
the current and future scale it is not possible or practical to test all
possible scenarios and more fruitful to monitor for live issues and correct in
short cycles. It requires a DevOps culture and fast iterations."
Overall in 2018, we can expect more of an emphasis on really
driving the results following the successful implementation and adoption of
DevOps.
DevSecOps
There has certainly been no shortage in 2017 of security
vulnerabilities, hacks and breaches. While some companies have already begun
integrating their developer and security teams to try and avoid having their
name circulated in less than favorable news reports, in 2018 you can expect
that to become more of a normal process for enterprises.
"Unfortunately, there will be at least one security breach
detected which is larger than the Equifax breach in 2018. Security breaches
related to unexpected uses of IoT connected devices will more than double
compared to 2017. Software related security breaches will be
significantly worse as the Internet of Things spreads insecure and at-risk
software components into more and more connected devices," said technical
evangelist Mark Waite.
So how do companies look to combat that? The acceptance and
continued integration of DevSecOps. "Security tools and practices will move
deeper and earlier into the development cycle in the same way ops tools and
practices did with DevOps," said engineering manager Michael Neale. Expanding
even further on that, Vilacides said, "developers will be responsible for
building, testing and running their services in production. Development,
quality and operational readiness will be part of the definition of a "you
build it, you run it" model. And naturally, if you are responsible for running
something in production, you will build it in a more robust and resilient way.
The quality and operations shift to the left is here."
What all of this boils down to is the continued improvement
of adoption and implementation processes for DevOps. "Why? Because it's not
just about doing DevOps, it's about managing DevOps, i.e. once you adopt
DevOps, you need to do it better and better every week. Constantly looking for
how to improve and elevate processes," said VP of customer success Francois
Dechery.
2018 will surely be a year for expansion and growth in the
DevOps industry and beyond.
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