DEVOPSdigest

Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how DevOps and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2023. Part 7 covers automation.

Start with: 2023 DevOps Predictions - Part 1

Start with: 2023 DevOps Predictions - Part 2

Start with: 2023 DevOps Predictions - Part 3

Start with: 2023 DevOps Predictions - Part 4

Start with: 2023 DevOps Predictions - Part 5

Start with: 2023 DevOps Predictions - Part 6

FOCUS ON CONTINUOUS DEPLOYMENT AUTOMATION

Development automation for CI/CD has long emphasized CI. In 2023, the focus shifts to continuous deployment, as increasingly sophisticated deployment automation tools become available for automating complex cloud native deployments at scale.
Jason Bloomberg
President, Intellyx(link is external)

EVOLVING PAST AUTOMATION TO CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT

In 2023, the DevOps industry will continue to evolve and enhance organization's ability to build, deploy, and maintain high-performance software solutions. The combined adoption of serverless infrastructure, AI/ML, microservices architectures, low-code technologies, etc. will bolster organizations capacity to evolve past automation, and towards continuous improvement. These trends will catalyze the creation of dependable release pipelines with improved collaboration between IT, development, and business teams.
Brian Galura
CEO, Convox

MOVING BEYOND AUTOMATION AND ORCHESTRATION TO STANDARDIZATION

Mature IT teams will move beyond automation and orchestration toward standardization — Developers often build automations for tools and processes. But siloed development teams across an organization often don't communicate, so developers end up automating the same things over and over again, reinventing the wheel. Mature IT teams will increasingly invest in smart standardization. They will collect and cull the smartest automation and orchestration artifacts, doing away with redundancies and inefficiencies across teams, departments and geographies. This will give rise to new smart catalogs of the best-built artifacts and standardize the best internal resources, ensuring IT teams are using the best automations and provisioning new functionality for all users across DevOps, ITOps, FinOps and SecOps.
Bernard Sanders
Co-Founder, CloudBolt(link is external)

MOVING FROM IMPERATIVE TO DECLARATIVE AUTOMATION

In 2023, we will begin seeing a rapidly expanding move from imperative approaches to declarative automation. Declarative allows users to set deployment objectives based on selected variables rather than manually making each decision. Over the next few years, the road will take developers from declarative to intelligent automation. The movement will accelerate quickly in three to five years once the basic AI techniques and tools become more established.
Jim Douglas
CEO and President, Armory.io(link is external)

THE IMPORTANCE OF INFRASTRUCTURE AUTOMATION

The rate of innovation around new technology will drive greater investment in infrastructure automation and the search for tools to manage the plethora of automation assets. The rate of tech innovation and evolution is significantly higher today, creating complexity across technology stacks, applications and infrastructures. This trend means environments will consist of a greater number of technologies that need to be governed and controlled and, ultimately, require more automation. As DevOps and infrastructure teams continue to invest in toolsets geared toward supporting the development process, organizations will be challenged by fragmentation leading to less visibility and control of development and operations. To manage this in the year ahead, there will be an increased demand for infrastructure automation technology to manage the overabundance of infrastructure environments and enable accessibility and productivity across the entire organization.
Lior Koriat
CEO, Quali(link is external)

EVERYTHING-AS-CODE

Everything is becoming applications and code, meaning automation will be everywhere. Developers will have more control and manageability over applications, so there will be increasing demand for APIs everywhere to enable everything possible to be as-code.
Erez Barak
VP of Product Development for Observability, Sumo Logic(link is external)

AUTOMATION COMBATS DEVELOPER SHORTAGE

A key DevOps trend to watch is automation. DevOps engineers and SREs are difficult to find — there's a labor shortage. So I'm excited about startups that are abstracting complexity away and make building and running applications easier such as DevOps autopilots and backend-as-a-service companies that reduce developer toil and help companies do more with less.
Rama Sekhar
Partner, Norwest Venture Partners(link is external)

AI WILL BECOME A DEVOPS COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

The future of enterprise DevOps is being able to turn data into actionable, predictive insights so enterprises can learn from past historical trends to make higher-quality software at greater speed and AI/ML has finally reached a tipping point to enable this. A machine learning model can now capture thousands of monthly change events, including who the team is, what infrastructure changed, what testing was done during development, who the developer or team was, defects that were found during testing, and other factors. In 2023, this information will increasingly be correlated to the success and failure of past changes so teams can learn from these past issues — and plan to avoid them.
Wing To
VP of Engineering for Value Stream Delivery Platform & DevOps, Digital.ai(link is external)

Go to: 2023 DevOps Predictions - Part 8, the final installment, covering testing.