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Five trends that will impact DevOps

By Lior Koriat, CEO, Quali

The pursuit of digital transformation has been a major initiative of most companies for many years now. Along with all the new technologies associated with digital transformation, comes new ways to think about business. We are on the precipice of a major evolution in how we manage application infrastructure in our industry, and with that we will see some interesting things happen in 2022.

The Skills Gap is Only Going to Get Worse

Companies are increasingly struggling to find people with the expertise to provision and manage cloud infrastructure. Expertise across multiple clouds and technology stacks is even harder to find, so companies need to look for solutions that address that part of the market. The talent bottleneck will continue to be exacerbated by the proliferation and complexity of infrastructure and cloud services and will further hinder the access to automated infrastructure. As a result, solutions that focus on making automated infrastructure more accessible to developers, testers, and other stakeholders in the lifecycle of application development will become crucial and more prevalent.

Infrastructure is No Longer a Cost Center

Another major trend we're likely to see in the year ahead is how people view infrastructure. In the past, many business stakeholders viewed infrastructure solely as a cost center. IT initiatives were largely centered on how we can drive down costs. That worldview is being flipped, particularly with the rise of product led growth strategies. Everything is now being tied back to "how will this investment impact revenue growth or make our product or service more competitive in the market?" IT, Cloud Ops, and DevOps teams are increasingly on the hook to report success through this lens.

That DevOps Guy (or Gal) is Becoming a Real Player

Because everything is being measured in terms of revenue contribution, the person that has a considerable role in getting new quality products and services to market faster - aka the DevOps folks - are becoming active stakeholders and not just clandestine contributors to the overall enterprise machine. As businesses work to better understand the impact of the infrastructure necessary for application development, DevOps teams will likely be held more accountable for understanding the business impact and revenue attribution behind such cloud costs and associated efforts throughout the DevOps lifecycle. As a result, they will also have more of a voice within their organizations.

Data without Context is Utterly Useless (This is already true, but will be even more true in 2022)

Building off the increasing role of DevOps teams' contribution to revenue, cloud cost and infrastructure consumption data will be meaningless without business context, which means that organizations will have to streamline access to the cloud, without sacrificing the ability to tie that infrastructure back to specific applications, services, or business units. Businesses will need to better understand not just how much they're spending for cloud infrastructure, but why and where that money is being spent. Additionally, the need for observability into the CI/CD process will dictate tracking business context such as builds, CI pipeline stages and test results, etc. when tracking infrastructure usage and performance. This will require the ability to trace cloud costs and usage directly back to the various business uses for cloud infrastructure, so they have more visibility on resource consumption across the organization.

The Developers will Have an Even Bigger Voice

Companies have always struggled with the paradox of wanting to go fast while maintaining control. Startups generally adopt a "go fast and break things" mantra, but as organizations scale, the need for control and governance become increasingly important. Ultimately, businesses will struggle to find that sweet spot, but one thing is for sure - tools that impede developer agility and velocity will be wholly rejected. Companies need tools that at worst, are invisible to the app dev team and, ideally, increase developers' ability to do what developers love to do: create really cool apps.

As our approach to managing cloud infrastructure evolves, businesses will need to evolve not only their mindset, but also their processes and their DevOps toolchains. Accountability for cloud infrastructure will also drive organizational and cultural change for many businesses over the next couple of years.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lior Koriat has served as Quali's CEO since November 2008. Lior previously served as COO and Vice-President of R&D since the beginning of 2007. Prior to Quali, Lior was founder and CEO of Intellitech Engineering in Israel and has 25 years of experience in system and software engineering in the fields of automation, infrastructure, real-time and embedded applications, robotics, and avionics. Lior led and managed large scale and complex technology programs in the fields of cloud, autonomous vehicles, airborne systems, flight simulation, and C4I systems. He holds a Bachelor's degree with honors in computer science and economics from Tel Aviv University.