2020 Vision—What Does the Future Hold for DevOps?

2019 was busy year for DevOps as measured by the events held on the topic. Whether it be DevOps days around the globe, DockerCon, DevOps Enterprise Summits, KubeCon, or CloudNativeCon, events are springing up to support this growing community. With a huge number of events already scheduled for 2020, people plan on improving their skills with this technology. This is great—it’ll allow DevOps leaders to close capability gaps and it should be a must for those on a DevOps journey in 2020. Hopefully, we’ll see more organizations adopt the key stages of DevOps evolution (foundation building, normalization, standardization, expansion, automated infrastructure delivery, and self-service) by following this model. Understanding where you are on the journey helps you plan what needs to be satisfied at each level before trying to move on to an area of greater complexity. By looking at the levels of integration and the growing tool chain, we can see where you are and plan accordingly. I look forward to seeing and reading about the trials and how they were overcome by organizations looking to further their DevOps movement in 2020. You’ll probably hear terms like NoOps and DevSecOps gain more traction over the coming year from certain analysts. I believe the name DevOps is currently fine for what you’re trying to achieve. If you follow correct procedures, then security and operations already make up a large subset of your workflows. Therefore, you shouldn’t need to call them out in separate terms. If you’re not pushing changes to live systems, then you aren’t really doing any operations, and therefore not truly testing your code. So how can you go back and improve or reiterate on it? As for security, while it’s hard to implement correctly and as difficult to work collaboratively together, there’s a greater need to adopt this technology correctly. Organizations that have matured and evolved through the stages above are far more likely to place emphasis on the integration of security than those just starting out. Improved security posture will be a key talking point as we progress through 2020 and into the next decade. Kubernetes will gain even more ground in 2020 as more people look to a way to provide a robust method of container orchestration to scale, monitor, and run any application, with many big-name software vendors investing in what they see as the “next battleground” for variants on the open-source application management tool. Organizations will start to invest in more use of artificial intelligence, whether it be for automation, remediation, or improved testing. You can’t deny artificial intelligence and machine learning are hot right now and will seep into this aspect of technology in 2020. The best place to be to try this is in a cloud provider, saving you the need to invest in hardware. Instead, the provider can get you up and running in minutes. Microservices and containers infrastructure will be another area of growth within the coming 12 months. Container registries are beneficial to organizations. Registries allow companies to apply policies, whether a security or access control policy and more, to how they manage containers. JFrog Container Registry is probably going to lead the charge in 2020, but don’t think they’ll have it easy as AWS, Google, Azure, and other software vendors have products fighting for this space. These are just a few areas I see will be topics of conversation and column inches as we move into 2020 and beyond, but it tells me this is the area to develop your skills if you want to be in demand as we move into the second decade of this century.