Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
The No Code DevOps Orchestration Boom
By Chandra Ranganathan, co-founder and CEO of Opsera
As we enter 2022, technology teams are faced with challenges
that accompany the rapid pace of digital transformation. While digital
initiatives remain a priority at most organizations, there is a severe gap in
the number of skilled professionals available to tackle the demands of software
delivery. Engineering and IT teams are faced with skill
shortages are still faced with skill shortages, unable to adequately fill
roles.
Not only do teams face a human skill shortage, but the tools
and multi-cloud ecosystems enabling digital transformation have also
skyrocketed in numbers and complexity has skyrocketed in numbers and
complexity. Engineers use various best-of-breed tools to develop, test, deploy
and manage software across the software delivery lifecycle, resulting in a very
complex and expensive challenge for companies to connect and integrate all of
these tools. It requires a substantial amount of code written by developers,
which further aggravates the skills gap challenge.
While enterprises continue to make strides with DevOps
initiatives, technology teams must continue to enable these digital
advancements while keeping up with the pace of security, compliance and
governance. In 2022, the technology leaders and teams need to tackle the skills
gap head-on and find ways to simplify the complexities that plague software
delivery.
Here are some key predictions for DevOps in 2022:
1) No-Code DevOps Orchestration will Boom
No-code development is on
the rise to improve developer productivity and efficiency. In 2022, no-code
DevOps orchestration will emerge to help teams address the complexities of
software delivery and close the skills gap. No-code DevOps orchestration
provides automation across the DevOps lifecycle from integrating and
maintaining diverse toolchains, creating automated pipeline workflows with
integrated security and quality gates and thresholds, and providing
intelligence across the software delivery lifecycle. There are two critical benefits
of no-code DevOps orchestration offers that will be particularly helpful in the
coming year:
- It
enables engineering and DevOps teams to integrate CI/CD and DevOps tools,
and build scalable no-code pipelines declaratively in minutes for various
use cases using a common framework.
- It
frees up developers to focus on building and shipping their core products
for faster go-to-market without having to stitch together and manage their
underlying tools and pipelines.
2) A Shift-Left approach for Security
The concept of shift-left is familiar to those within the
technology industry. However, shift-left adoption is not yet widespread. In
2022, as software attacks continue to rise,
shifting security left will be more crucial than ever.
By shifting security, quality and compliance left,
engineering teams can reduce much of the complexities and risk factors of
delivering software. They can automate code, container and infrastructure scans
as well as threat and vulnerability checks in a proactive manner by integrating
the appropriate security tools. Automation of processes like quality checks and
approval gates leads to fewer outages post-deployment and helps ensure
compliance. Shift left achieved via no-code orchestration of pipelines will
also enhance collaboration between development, security and quality
engineering teams.
3) Unified and Predictive Insights
Today, as teams move toward DevOps maturity, they must ensure
faster delivery of applications on multiple platforms across multiple cloud
environments. As teams deal with these more complex software delivery pipelines
while battling a shortage of skilled employees, they risk poor visibility and
reporting. As a result, engineering teams see a downward impact to their
productivity, security and compliance posture.
With the emergence of no-code DevOps orchestration, we will
see the abstraction, correlation and contextualization of metadata and logs
from different tools across the DevOps spectrum to enable actionable insights
for different personas. Real-time unified logs across tools help minimize
troubleshooting and resolution times, and cross-functional metrics and
scorecards can help track and optimize efficiencies, security and compliance.
The incorporation of machine learning capabilities will enable predictive
insights and self-healing.
2022 Outlook
As engineering and IT leaders and teams aim to deliver
better features and capabilities to their customers as fast, securely and
cost-effectively as possible, they need to spend less time and resources
building, integrating and maintaining complex tools and pipelines. In 2022,
we'll see more adoption of no-code DevOps orchestration practices, shifting
security left and leveraging unified and predictive insights as organizations
move closer to DevOps maturity.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chandra Ranganathan is the co-founder and CEO of Opsera (www.opsera.io), a continuous orchestration platform
for Next-Gen DevOps. In prior roles, Chandra was the Head of Enterprise
Infrastructure for Uber and Vice President of IT at Symantec. Chandra is a
technology executive with experience spanning Information Technology, Product
Management, and Product Engineering in the High-Tech and Finance industries,
with domain expertise in DevOps, Cloud, Infrastructure, and Security.