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.

##

About the Author

Derek Choy, CIO