Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2018.  Read them in this 10th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Deepak Giridharagopal, CTO, Puppet

Trends That Will Shape DevOps in 2018

The latest Puppet State of DevOps Report helps separate hype and myth from what meaningfully affects your business. With the new year right around the corner, here are some things worth pondering in 2018.

Tackling DevOps Systematically

When it comes to DevOps, companies will need to start thinking more holistically. Empowering individual teams with more automation is fantastic; our research shows that it can help teams move faster, more reliably and with better results.

However, at a certain point the major bottlenecks stop revolving around individual teams' efficiency and become more about larger organizational and structural issues. Companies must think in earnest about restructuring their organizations, streamlining processes and choosing adaptable, pluggable tools. That's what it will take to build more cross-functional, autonomous teams with the freedom to act quickly, effectively and without fear.

Changing company culture and structure is a problem often beyond the power of individual engineers. 2018 will place more pressure upon company leaders to drive these changes. Doing things the way you've always done them, except a little bit faster. Soon that won't be good enough. 

The Changing Role of Networking

Next year, we will see much greater demand for the continuous delivery of changes to networking. Containerization, evolving security practices and the development and deployment of increasingly distributed systems will all put pressure on networking to be as flexible and as automation-friendly as the software that runs over it.

As a result, we're going to see new demands placed on network administrators. Businesses will increasingly expect network admins to invest in software automation skills. As networks become more software-defined, sowill network administration become more like managing complex software.  

The DevOps landscape is constantly changing, and 2018 will be no different. It's worth observing any changing trends, shifting roles and emerging technologies. They may merit rethinking how you approach the big problems ahead of you.

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About the Author

 

Deepak Giridharagopal, CTO, Puppet

Deepak guides Puppet's technical development. He has played an integral role in every version of Puppet and Puppet Enterprise shipped since joining Puppet in 2011. Over the years, Deepak has overseen development of major versions of core projects, including the Puppet language, Facter, PuppetDB, Puppet Server, and major features such as application orchestration. Deepak's work has helped Puppet achieve the massive increases in performance and scale that Puppet users depend on.