
Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019. Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Derek Choy, CIO at Rainforest
Security and Data at the Forefront of DevOps
This has been another exciting year for DevOps, with more teams
adopting continuous integration and delivery to meet the faster cycles needed
to deliver quality software. Having worked closely with businesses of all sizes
over the past 12 months, I've seen some other trends emerge that provide a hint
of where software development is headed in 2019. Here are some predictions I'm
making for how software engineering will evolve in the coming year. Hold on to
your hats, because software development ain't slowing down.
Security moves upstream in 2019
Everybody is waking up to the fact that data security is a critical
problem that needs to be addressed earlier in the development process. This is
true not only for customers whose data is on the line, but also business
leaders and software developers who are charged with protecting it. Today,
these parties are trying to understand how they can incorporate security into
their DevOps process. In 2019, businesses will implement what the have learned.
Tech leaders will educate developers on how to avoid errors like coding
security holes into their apps. Additionally, developers will increasingly add
security detection features at the code level. Not only will code be better
protected against intruders; it will watch out for anomalous activity as well.
All job interviews for
developers will include a question about security experience
Developers who have job interviews next year will see a new question
added to the usual list. For the first time, we will see virtually all
businesses incorporating questions about security in coding. Engineers applying
for jobs should highlight this experience to increase their chances. Deep
security knowledge won't be a requirement for all roles, but DevOps managers
will increasingly prioritize those with security experience when they make
their hiring decisions. The issue is simply too critical to ignore.
In 2019, data experts will start
to become an integral part of developer teams
Data has become a vital weapon for businesses, and dev
teams are increasingly bringing real-time data into the applications and
services they build. This means working more closely with data professionals,
and next year we will see more data experts being embedded inside developer
teams. This will show up in two areas: Structure and process. In terms of
structure, teams that build the infrastructure for delivering real-time data to
applications will become part of the dev team to ensure storage and pipelines
for delivering real-time data streams run smoothly. In terms of process, data
experts will also join dev team meetings, such as sprint planning, daily
standups and retrospectives. Making them an official part of the development
process will ensure tighter collaboration and better results. Bringing
real-time data into apps is not easy, and the worlds of data experts and
developers will start to merge next year to make this happen.
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About the Author
Derek Choy, CIO
At Rainforest, Derek Choy is responsible for driving
product and technical innovation and scaling Rainforest's globally distributed
engineering, product and professional services teams. Before joining
Rainforest, Choy was vice president of engineering for Aria Systems, scaling a
similarly distributed engineering team by 10X, which supported revenue growth
of more than 20X. Prior to Aria Systems, Choy was director of software
development at eBay, where he led product development for its billing platform,
and was responsible for streamlining processes across several teams. Choy has
also held senior engineering and management positions at Accenture and
AT&T.