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OpsVerse 2023 Predictions: DevOps is not dead

vmblog-predictions-2023 

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 

Arul Jegadish, co-founder of OpsVerse, has spent the last decade building OSS DevOps pipelines.

Published Monday, November 28, 2022 7:46 AM by David Marshall
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