Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019. Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Wesley Pullen, Chief Strategy Officer,
Electric Cloud
The Future of DevOps for the Enterprise, Trends, and Insights
Finding focus in a digitally driven world is a
challenge that businesses now confront daily. The rise of digital
transformation for enterprises creates a world of complex software delivery.
Further, enterprises encounter threats and issues at virtually every point
along their release pipelines. Now, as this digital transformation journey
continues to expand, companies are realizing that their future cannot exist
without adopting DevOps practices and patterns. These trends and insights will
ease that transition and build a better future for your company in 2019.
3 Key Trends and Predictions in the Enterprise
for 2019:
1) Cloud/Container:
Enterprises are constantly expanding and adding tools and mechanisms to their
pipeline hoping to gain an edge on competitors, and managing that process can
be extremely challenging. That is why migration to the cloud is happening now,
and happening fast. However, not all cloud strategies are equal, and some
approaches and toolsets are more likely to help your business succeed than
others. Take the multi-cloud approach for instance, this approach utilizes a
combination of traditional on-premise apps, microservices, and hybrid cloud
attributes and has worked well for many enterprises already. The current
standard is to have a variety of DevOps tools that often serve just one or two
primary functions in the pipeline. Prediction:
companies will likely start moving towards a single DevOps tool that can
streamline the entire pipeline across all teams and projects.
2) The
Rise of DevSecOps: The significance and importance of DevSecOps cannot be
understated. The success of DevOps and the cloud industry as a whole will only
go as far as the DevSecOps category can take it. Technology solutions and infosec
approaches for DevSecOps programs must transform and evolve at the speed of the
DevOps transformations. Prediction: this
demand will cause a dramatic shift in the security industry, leading to
increased collaboration and integration between IT security and DevOps teams.
The end goal? To ultimately produce an extremely
powerful and efficient pipeline that maximizes the utility of tooling within
it. DevSecOps is critical to the success of DevOps and without it, the software
that was once transforming the world will now be infecting it.
3) AI/ML
for DevOps Feedback: The potential and utility of Artificial Intelligence
and Machine Learning stretch far beyond robots and self-driving cars. Prediction: companies will begin to leverage
the data they gather from disparate systems and integrate that information into
a broader business level understanding of AI and machine learning and the value
they provide.
Understanding how AI and machine learning
interacts with the entire DevOps toolchain goes a long way toward explaining
this value. It can help your company identify certain patterns using Deep
Statistical Analytics. By leveraging past patterns, your company can predict
future risk, giving DevSecOps teams the opportunity to make recommendations
that reduce that risk. This also allows developers and engineers to move from a
reactive to predictive feedback throughout the pipeline. This type of risk
analysis is just a fraction of the benefits that AI and ML will provide for
companies through 2019 and beyond.
Short answer predictions:
- DevOps is real, and it provides a real strategic
advantage for companies who understand how it can transform and streamline
processes throughout their company.
- The Hybrid-Cloud and Multi-Cloud approaches have become
the new standard.
- Security teams will begin to have more involvement and
a louder voice to validate code that is being pushed through to
production.
- AI and ML will continue to evolve and deliver value in
new and powerful ways for businesses.
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About the Author
Wesley Pullen is the Chief DevOps Strategist at Electric Cloud. In
this capacity, he leads the strategy for DevOps, Release Automation and
Continuous Delivery (CD) solutions for Electric Cloud. Wesley brings
over 20 years of industry experience in enterprise products in
Application Release Automation (ARA), Application Lifecycle Management
(ALM), IT Service Management (ITSM) and Application Performance
Monitoring (APM). Prior to joining Electric Cloud, he held leadership
positions with CollabNet, Automic (now CA), and BMC.
Wesley holds a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from University of Pittsburgh.