DEVOPSdigest

Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how DevOps and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2020. Part 4 covers AI, analytics and automation.

Start with 2020 DevOps Predictions - Part 1

Start with 2020 DevOps Predictions - Part 2

Start with 2020 DevOps Predictions - Part 3

SMARTER DEVOPS

Organizations will increasingly incorporate analytics for "smarter" DevOps. Mature DevOps organizations are at the stage today where they are close to maximizing efficiency gains across their workflows. As these organizations look to go even faster and increase productivity, data science, AI, and automated analytical tools will become more integrated into workflows to improve efficiency and time to market. Developers will look to data science tooling to better project application outcomes through historical data and telemetry around repository logs, test results, infrastructure workloads, and more. This coupled with more intelligent alerting and smarter event-driven triggers will drive continuous integration workflows that unlock the next wave of productivity-driven success.
Sid Phadkar
Senior Product Manager, Akamai

SMARTER DEVOPS PLANNING

Lift & Shift has been the norm for cloud migrations to date. However, the migration of core applications, requiring re-factoring, re-architecture, and use of PaaS cloud services has now started in earnest. We will see many more organizations enhance their DevOps pipelines with deeper architectural insights to employ more effective planning during such modernization. In the process, we will see them relying on software intelligence capabilities to guide them along the way — visualize the existing architecture and open source dependencies, automatically identify cloud migration roadblocks, understand better the impact of changes made and ensure adherence to the desired To-Be architecture state.
Rado Nikolov
EVP, CAST

ML IS EVERYWHERE

Machine learning driven capabilities will show up in any and every software offering, the results will range from gimmick, to mind-blowing and revolutionary to downright spooky and unsettling.
Brian Dawson
DevOps Evangelist and Product Suite Marketing, CloudBees

AI ENABLES AUTONOMOUS HYBRID CLOUD

AI in IT Operations and Dev(Sec)Ops is gaining more traction and is likely to grab attention for unicorn investments. Established platform vendors are investing heavily in this space and will focus on creating an autonomous hybrid cloud. Kubernetes will be a focal point for the autonomous hybrid cloud, as it provides the required standardization and automation capabilities, especially in combination with the Kubernetes Operators concept. For customers, this means improved reliability, quality, and scale both in production as well as in their DevOps workflows.
Daniel Riek
Senior Director, AI Center of Excellence, Office of the CTO, Red Hat
Sanjay Arora
Senior Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat

ANALYTICS MEETS KUBERNETES

While containers and Kubernetes works exceptionally well for stateless applications like web servers and self-contained databases, we haven't seen a ton of container usage when it comes to advanced analytics and AI. In 2020, we'll see a shift to AI and analytic workloads becoming more mainstream in Kubernetes land. "Kubernetifying" the analytics stack will mean solving for data sharing and elasticity by moving data from remote data silos into K8s clusters for tighter data locality.
Haoyuan Li
Founder and CTO, Alluxio

DEVELOPMENT AUTOMATION RE-SHAPES THE NEXT DECADE

Development automation will re-shape the next decade in software development. With low/no-code technologies and ML/AI solutions, development teams will be better equipped with advance tools to build more resilient software. In addition, and as cloud, microservices, and containerized software become commodities, developers will find better ways to create software that leverages these core technologies in an automated fashion.
Eran Kinsbruner
Chief Evangelist and Author, Perfecto at Perforce Software

DEVOPS INVESTS IN MORE AUTOMATION

In 2020, adoption of DevOps will continue to evolve where companies will realize the need to invest more in end to end automation tools in order to speed innovation, deploy faster with few errors and increase SaaS and PaaS agility.
Anand Ramakrishnan
QA Director, QASource

DevOps is still an aspiration in most organizations rather than a reality. The main reason is lack of pipeline activities automation. In 2020, organizations will invest more in automating manual activities within their DevOps pipeline from testing activities, environments setup, monitoring, and deployments to production. Organizations will tackle all of the manual checkpoints and gateways in the process, optimize and automate them as much as possible to expedite release cycles, and remove errors within the process.
Eran Kinsbruner
Chief Evangelist and Author, Perfecto at Perforce Software

As continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) deployments become commonplace, and infrastructure stays elastic based on demand, I predict that companies will demand more and more automation. Today we are barely scratching the surface with DevOps automation, and in the coming year more companies in the DevOps space will likely develop features that enable workflows. Previously, intelligent alerts were the prime offering.
Tej Redkar
Chief Product Office, LogicMonitor

NEW AUTOMATION TOOLS

Total automation of the DevOps chain remained aspirational in 2019. To address this, I expect to see more tools in 2020 that address key manual steps, such as the automation of dependency resolution which will help enable the automated refresh of up-to-date CI/CD environments.
Bart Copeland
CEO and President, ActiveState

Automation has untapped but inherent value. The more we automate security processes and DevOps processes, the more DevOps and security teams will be able to handle the mounting complexity of deployments that comes with infrastructural and operational maturity. The need for automation increases the more extensive and dynamic an application or service is. The rate of adoption for cloud-native infrastructure will continue to increase alongside innovation. As a result, we'll see more tooling that will aim to automate elements of development and security processes, to avoid constraints that could limit the operational benefits of cloud-native environments. The more these organizations can leverage automation, the more safe, secure, stable, and operationally efficient their environments will become.
Wei Lien Dang
VP of Product and Co-Founder, StackRox

Go to 2020 DevOps Predictions - Part 5, covering application development including Low Code and No Code.