Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019. Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Ari Weil, Global VP of Product and Industry Marketing, Akamai
DevOps Boiling Point Ahead for Digital Laggards
From
increased security and governance oversight as a result of a major breach, to
enterprise demand for standardization and ecosystem integrations, DevOps is
poised to undergo major transformation in the year ahead. Ari Weil,
Global VP of Product and Industry Marketing at Akamai, weighs in on these and other key
predictions for the DevOps industry in 2019.
Stumbles
will level set what "agility" really means for DevOps. Agility is defined as the ability to
move quickly and easily. For most businesses the holy grail of agility has
meant automating continuous release and deployment for applications in order to
realize value faster. But as complexity increases exponentially through
transformations, integrations, and permutations of what a hybrid deployment
look like, the process definitions of the stodgy, legacy enterprise will begin
to creep in as knowledge gaps expose businesses to risks and compromise. The
trick will be to establish rigor to mitigate risk without resulting in
rigor-mortis.
A
major breach will result in a massive fine or fallout in the user community. As businesses continue to evolve
existing processes and encourage experimentation and scale through DevOps
initiatives, the "healthy" friction from misaligned team values will
force behaviors that will ultimately result in exposure in the form of a
significant data breach. Whereas governance and oversight have been seen
as an anathema to agile teams (because they assume legacy controls applied to
modern workflows), the industry will begin to reconcile how controls can enable
agility, not restrict it. This will result in the industry revisiting the
notion of DevSecOps and redoubling efforts in awareness, education, and
enablement.
Disillusionment
with the over-promising of AI and ML will grow in the face of longer time to
value. Vendors have
been in a marketing arms race to leverage the terms Artificial Intelligence
(AI) and Machine Learning (ML). In 2019, businesses will begin to realize that
the current capabilities of the technology can solve for the simple, routine
problems that are noisy but less valuable to the business, but leave the custom
logic and complex corner cases to individuals to solve. Whether the catalyst
comes from forensic tools that miss detecting advanced threats until
significant damage has been done, or monitoring and analytics software that
fails to detect the root cause of an issue in a complex deployment environment,
the industry will reawaken to the value of evolving specialists vs. purchasing
intelligence.
Skills
gaps for key versatilist positions will bring new legitimacy to managed
services. After key
roles and skills go unfilled through the first quarter of 2019, businesses will
come to appreciate staffing versatilist roles from a managed service provider.
The complexity of cloud orchestration, API-driven integrations, and custom
logic will require investments in key areas of differentiation while leaving
gaps in the critical functions to integrate and operate heterogeneous
deployments - the bread and butter of cloud and other PaaS and IaaS vendors.
Experience
value will transition to platform value with IT leaders demanding OOTB
integrations. CIOs and
architects will grow weary of the "Wild Wild West" of DevOps
toolchains and begin mandating standardized integrations with proven scale in
the form of available support and operations expertise. This will accelerate
the consolidation of adjacent and niche solutions as medium and large
businesses demand standardization and ecosystem integrations from the major
players in the industry.
Competitive
disruption will drive remaining laggards to a DevOps boiling point. As the industry moves to the plateau of
productivity with DevOps automation and standard tooling, laggard executives
will reach a management crisis point that will force actions.
Mainframe-centric, heavily regulated, and even businesses that have
historically not identified the external catalyst for transformation will awaken
to the reality of missed business opportunities if they fail to adapt
architectures and processes to embrace cloud technologies and modern ways of
developing and deploying technology. Developing nations and a backlash against
nationalism will drive a global move to leverage technology to open and mature
key markets, which will shine a spotlight on the last bastions of waterfalls
and walled gardens.
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About the Author
Ari Weil is the Global VP
of Product Marketing for Akamai's Web Division. As a hands-on executive with
experience across various management and operational disciplines Ari focuses on
Akamai's security, performance, and cloud migration strategy and brings 20
years of cross-functional enterprise management expertise to his role. His key
areas of focus include cloud migration, adaptive security, and modern
application architectures.