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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