Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2021. Read them in this 13th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Ethics, Kubernetes, DevOps and more!
2020 was certainly not the year anyone expected. The pandemic took the world as we knew it and turned it on its head, changing the way we live, work and play. While it hasn’t been the easiest year for many, there have been positive (and likely lasting) changes-from the rise of remote work to a greater focus on diversity and ethics in technology.
Looking ahead, the crew at CloudBees shared their predictions for 2021 with these changes in mind. Here’s what the team thinks we’ll see in the year ahead:
In 2021, it’s time for tech to get ethical
This past year, we saw a powerful movement for better diversity, inclusion and awareness. 2021 will be the year that the seeds planted in 2020 will start to grow. Brian Dawson, DevOps evangelist, thinks that in the new year the focus on ethics of technology will ramp up. “The increased use of AI will bring about the discovery of more issues, bias, etc.,” said Dawson. “Innovation for the sake of innovation without consideration of the wider impact can be dangerous, and tech giants and start-ups alike will begin to focus on this more and if not they will be increasingly held accountable.”
Kristin Baskett, senior product marketing manager for CloudBees CI, also sees machine learning and artificial intelligence getting the diversity and inclusion treatment in 2021: “The inherent and unintentional biases of the largely homogenous creators of machine learning and artificial intelligence solutions slip into algorithms, testing methodologies and training data sets and into the final product. The emphatic call to level the playing field over the last year has set the stage to solve this problem. After all, in many ways software is easier to examine for bias than the human mind.”
Keep coming, Kubernetes and friends!
While Kubernetes is not there yet in terms of mass adoption, it did continue to grow ever popular in the software development space. In 2021, there might be a few challenges along the way, but container orchestration will continue to evolve and grow.
Karen Taggart, product owner, shared a few of her predictions: “More lightweight orchestration tools/methods will begin to appear to compete with Kubernetes. At the same time, Kubernetes will work to become more accessible.” Taggart continued, “In 2021, Apple will finally have a cloud offering like AWS, Google Cloud and Azure – and of course it will include Apple Kubernetes (but I still won’t use an iPhone). They will have a snappy name for it that will be different from the EKS, GKE, AKS acronyms.”
Connecting Dev and Ops
The new year will bring more development in the DevOps space and Brian Dawson thinks that 2021 will see a great connection between “Dev” and “Ops.” “This will be the year that we truly begin to realize the potential of DevOps and true end-to-end, automation-built continuous delivery practices,” said Dawson. “In 2021, the larger more complex enterprise will begin to unify automation across functional silos and varied tech stacks to better align Dev and Ops (and security and the business). We will see less instances of companies with Dev-based DevOps tools and practices and Ops-based DevOps tools and practices used, purchased and defined independent of each other. Dev + Ops is not just a term, it is not just tools, it is not just culture. Instead, it is truly facilitating alignment, shared ownership and coordination between Dev, Ops and other stakeholders.”
A few other CloudBees employees chimed in with their DevOps predictions as well. “The DevOps industry is expected to be a $10 billion industry by 2023. We are seeing an increasing trend of companies investing in DevOps, in every industry and market. The demand for DevOps is driven by lower costs, flexibility and faster delivery. This increased demand will in turn increase the demand for more DevOps professionals,” says Erin Lovern, director of talent acquisition.
Shawn Ahmed, SVP and GM of Software Delivery Automation believes “we will see software delivery management evolve to a system based on integrated tools, common data and processes and universal insights. Software delivery has to become a single source of truth across the enterprise, enabling departments outside of IT to be more connected with release-related info and less siloed. IT will still be able to focus on delivering great software that delivers value to customers, but other areas across the company will also be able to plan better based on the actual status of a release at any given time.”
Looking at DevOps and security, Tim Johnson, senior product marketing manager for CloudBees CD, believes “the fervor around DevSecOps will cool because the market and analysts will recognize that security in development, delivery and production needs to be built in at a fundamental level, thus obviating the need to think about DevSecOps as somehow separate from DevOps.”
Finally, Mike Baldani, product marketing manager, Software Delivery Management, thinks that “in 2021, the concept of DevOps will be invigorated. More and more companies will understand that DevOps is not just about tools, automation and orchestration, but very much about people and processes. There’s a human side to DevOps, based on close collaboration, communication and a collective effort to remove bottlenecks and deliver results as efficiently as possible. This human side of DevOps will become more prominent in the next year and more experts will want to address it.”
We’re excited to see what 2021 holds for the DevOps and tech industries. As we close in on the new year, we’re hopeful that the year to come will bring more transformation and innovation.
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