Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023. Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
DevOps is not dead
By Arul Jegadish, co-founder of OpsVerse
"DevOps
is dead" has been trending. I predict DevOps is not dead and will continue to
live for some time. To weigh in, one must first understand what DevOps is.
DevOps is a methodology that enables developers and operators to work together
efficiently. It's not a tool, nor a role nor a team (although organizations
started naming engineers with the "DevOps" title). Given how wholeheartedly the
industry has adopted DevOps methodologies, with a satisfaction
rate of up to 99%, DevOps is here to stay.
To
further understand this, let's look at the routine of a developer before the
DevOps era. Take the example of a Java developer in 2007. If they wanted to
upgrade the version of the Java runtime in production, it was a multi-week
effort involving multiple teams (Devs, QAs, program managers, Ops engineers,
sysadmins etc). Tasks involved opening tickets for other teams, scheduling the
rollout in QA and stage environments, and finally rolling it out to production
through a tightly controlled process. Any error in any of the above steps would
result in further delays.
Roll
forward to the era after Docker containers became mainstream, which came around
the beginning of the DevOps movement. The same developer was then able to
update the definition of the Dockerfile to upgrade the JVM, test it thoroughly
on their laptop, and be assured that it would work exactly the same in
production. And, importantly, the developer didn't have to coordinate with
anyone else. This is what DevOps has enabled. As long as there is a need for
such seamlessness, DevOps practices will persist in 2023 and beyond.
Organizations will adopt consolidated toolchains
The
last few years have seen a massive adoption of microservices-based
architectures. A recent O'Reilly report found that 77% of respondents
have adopted microservices, with 92% experiencing success with microservices,
so the adoption is expected to grow. This, combined with similar adoption of
cloud-native technologies, has resulted in the exponential explosion of the
number of tools needed by a modern software engineering team.
Operationalizing
and running these tools has become a significant constraint for engineering
teams. Often, teams spend more time working on their tools' reliability than
working on their core products' reliability. In 2023, organizations will favor
solutions addressing this pain point. More specifically, solutions offering
fully-operationalized and consolidated toolchains. OpsVerse, Harness, and Gitlab are
some vendors to keep an eye on.
Companies will adopt platform engineering practices and manage
their IDP
While
the platform engineering practice isn't new, the democratization of the idea
and publicity around the term will result in companies adopting the concept.
This concept centers around a few key priorities for organizations. One is to gain
another pillar of observability: the entire software ecosystem such as which
services talk to which, how new engineers can be on-boarded, where to make
changes. A second one is the ability to create tools that give engineers
targeted self-serviceability. These working together will allow organizations
to see their landscape and move forward at lightning speed. This is where an IDP (Internal Developer Platform) comes into play.
Since
not all businesses can use SaaS products due to compliance or security reasons,
I predict a rise in products helping organizations easily build their IDP. They
are at the heart of a platform engineering strategy providing a unified view of
DevOps tools, microservices catalog, and documentation. The IDP platform
Backstage is already gaining strong momentum among the community - and their
booth at the last KubeCon was always packed - I also predict alternative
solutions to emerge as the market grows.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Arul Jegadish, co-founder of OpsVerse, has spent the last decade
building OSS DevOps pipelines.