Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022.  Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Codefresh Sees Argo Ascendant in 2022

By Dan Garfield, Kostis Kapelonis, and Hannah Seligson, Codefresh

Argo has emerged as the fastest growing and most popular open-source GitOps tool today, and the open-source community's overwhelmingly enthusiastic response to the inaugural ArgoCon earlier in December affirmed that this trend will continue in 2022 - and far beyond. Contributing and helping to lead the project, Codefresh is committed to advancing Argo's and GitOps' strategic value with significant, sustained open-source contributions in 2022. Enterprise-class tooling for Argo and GitOps best practices will enable faster software delivery and smoother, scalable DevOps automation in the year ahead, and the recently announced Argo community marketplace will help users further optimize Argo Workflow efficiencies.

Among our other predictions for 2022:

• Standardization of the Gateway API will simplify a lot of operations around API Gateways. On the other hand, this also means that API gateways will slowly become a commodity.
• Metrics will become more important than ever, as they will need to be used for deployments (i.e. progressive delivery) and not just monitored after deployment.
• The ecosystem around ArgoCD will explode with several plugins and associated projects. Deploying on Kubernetes will finally become a painless task.
• Service meshes will gain more popularity as a way to secure traffic inside a Kubernetes cluster, especially in finance and other security sensitive areas.
• Event based workflows for Kubernetes will be back in the spotlight (based on Argo Events).
• Infrastructure deployment and Application deployment will happen in a unified way with the help of Crossplane.
• Developers will keep demanding more intuitive tools for Kubernetes applications. More solutions will appear that focus specifically on how developers interact with Kubernetes.
• Other cloud providers will copy GKE autopilot and offer their own version of "turn-key" Kubernetes workloads.
• Microservice architecture will become lighter and more scalable with more resilience and automation as larger organizations adopt it.
• Serverless computing and data centers will allow developers to gain more control for automating their workflows.
• As AI development grows, we can expect more AI-driven automation tools and analytics that will allow new features to be built quickly, make pipelines smarter by anticipating issues, automate day-to-day processes, and reduce human errors.
• SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) techniques will gain popularity amongst more development teams and organizations, prioritizing delivery and operations.
• Secrets management will mature for GitOps, with encrypted Git storage, automated key rotation, secret dependencies, backup schedules and cloud native integrations.