Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2020.  Read them in this 12th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

By Sid Phadkar, Senior Product Manager at Akamai

Unlocking the next wave of DevOps driven efficiencies

DevOps based practices have reached the maturity point where CTOs and Architects are brainstorming ways to drive the next set of efficiencies in their software development lifecycles. This is at an interesting time when organizations are driving focus toward cost management and security. Expect a creative drive toward smarter, simpler, more secure, but cost-conscious DevOps initiatives in 2020.

As the economy becomes more unstable, organizations will look to validate and optimize the value their DevOps tooling provides at scale.

Many market pundits are predicting a massive downturn or recession in the next 12 to 24 months, meaning organizations everywhere are going to seek ways to cut costs without cutting output to weather the storm. Cloud-first and digital transformation initiatives within organizations have typically been given a free hand on budgetary needs over the last few years. At the same time, the maturity of DevOps tooling has meant that these tools have evolved and are now leveraged at scale and getting costlier every day. In 2020, organizations will have a significant focus on cost structures and will look to leverage DevOps tooling that provides equivalent value, but minimizes costs at scale.

A focus on end-to-end lifecycle management will streamline DevOps workflow complexity.

With the emergence of microservices and CI/CD toolchains, there has been an emphasis on developing and leveraging many different tools to tackle small tasks spread across similar parallel workflows. For example, two different teams within an organization often have their own CI/CD pipelines consisting of many different tools catering to version control, build automation, monitoring analytics, early testing, code review processes, and more. While organizations have reaped the benefits of catering to customized workflows, this has also led to incredible tool sprawl within often dispersed teams that can hinder productivity. DevOps vendors are often tasked with ensuring compatibility with tools from other vendors. In 2020, the number of tools will continue to increase, but there will be a movement toward end-to-end lifecycle management and single applications that streamline tooling and workflows to ultimately improve software development speed and agility.

DevSecOps will become real.

With the rising number of data breaches and increased emphasis on data privacy regulations such as PSD2 and GDPR both in the U.S. and globally, DevOps-savvy organizations will be forced to prioritize diligence in security measures overtime to market in the year ahead. As new regulations are put into place, more application developers will be mandated to build strict security policies directly within code. There will be an uptick in DevOps tools that cater to automating more compliance-related tasks within infosec teams, thus incorporating security and compliance measures into everyday CI workflows.

Organizations will increasingly incorporate analytics for "smarter" DevOps. 

Mature DevOps organizations are at the stage today where they are close to maximizing efficiency gains across their workflows. As these organizations look to go even faster and increase productivity, data science, AI, and automated analytical tools will become more integrated into workflows to improve efficiency and time to market. Developers will look to data science tooling to better project application outcomes through historical data and telemetry around repository logs, test results, infrastructure workloads, and more. This coupled with more intelligent alerting and smarter event-driven triggers will drive continuous integration workflows that unlock the next wave of productivity-driven success. 

The maturity of DevOps tooling is starting to pivot organizations toward added complexity and bloated costs, and less incremental gains. Integrating security mandates, smarter & predictive intelligence, and simpler management will ensure DevOps tooling will continue to drive the exponential benefits it previously has.

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About the Author

 

Sid is a product manager at Akamai focused on enabling delightful experiences for our developer base. He is currently focused on making Akamai an organic component of our user's continuous integration workflows as well as making Akamai the go-to platform for any API traffic needs for our customers.

As a Product Manager, Sid loves to understand the why behind things. He is passionate about making decisions informed by customer stories and data.

Prior to joining Akamai, Sid spent a few years consulting tech companies in optimizing development lifecycles and a few PM years at Dell EMC launching the company's first-ever subscription-based product offering aimed at hybrid cloud datacenters. Sid holds a Computer Science degree from UT Dallas and an MBA from Duke University (he has particularly strong opinions on Duke basketball). In his spare time, Sid can be found trying to make an impression in local pickup soccer leagues around Boston.