DEVOPSdigest

Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how DevOps and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2022. Part 4 covers microservices and agile development.

Start with: 2022 DevOps Predictions - Part 1

Start with: 2022 DevOps Predictions - Part 2

Start with: 2022 DevOps Predictions - Part 3

Shield the ERP Core and Make your Changes on the Outside

Agile development will impact how changes are made to classic monolithic ERP systems. Instead of making changes to the business logic at the core of ERP systems, microservices will be used as a layer of abstraction. Changes that are normally implemented in a long waterfall project can be made incrementally due to the specific logic a microservice provides.
Eran Kriegshauser
SAP DevOps Architect, Basis Technologies

AGILE GOES BACK TO BASICS

In some respects, I think we'll see enterprises go back to basics with agile development in 2022. Over the last two years, the pandemic and distributed work have revealed to companies what works, what doesn't, and the actual business value agile drives. Due to that, I think we'll see organizations less interested in having the shiny new agile tool and more focused on what solves their business-critical problems. Now is a great time for organizations to introspect and adapt. If your prevailing system of management was not meeting your needs, time to invest in your people and culture.
Jon Kern
Agile Consultant and Co-Author of The Agile Manifesto, Adaptavist

AGILE AT SCALE LIMITS AGILITY

With agile thinking expanding across enterprises during the pandemic, I think organizations are finally going to start realizing in 2022 that agile at scale doesn't get to the root of their problems. It may even mask their problems! A lot of the heavy process and overhead that comes with doing agile at scale just limits overall agility. Rather than focusing on controlling agile, I hope that companies will shift to fostering more autonomy while moving towards collective goals. Doing so would enable companies to embrace the true agile that can come from real human connections in a collaborative, cross-functional, joyous agile work culture.
Jon Kern
Agile Consultant and Co-Author of The Agile Manifesto, Adaptavist

MACROSERVICES

When microservices are indeed micro, they leave out things that are considered macro, by definition. The problem with this is that microservices can't solve an entire problem on their own. Macroservices (batch) need to be involved. The combination of both micro- and macroservices is what allows for the creation of one uniform architecture. Because of this, we're going to find that macroservices, and especially services that maintain state, are needed to create the uniformity we need within architectures to successfully solve problems.
Ashfaq Munshi
CEO, Pepperdata

MICROSERVICES OVERCOMES BARRIERS

Moving into 2022, leaders will be primarily focused on modernizing their IT infrastructures — specifically connecting longstanding enterprise IT assets into a modern, API-first, microservices-based architecture. There were many barriers in 2021 that held back the advancement of microservices, but this year will be different. Organizations will be investing more in microservices implementation, allowing for a larger staff skillset to be created in order to utilize microservices properly. Looking at APIs, microservices and integration solutions as separate parts will no longer be enough. The future for organizations is a bundled solution that incorporates all of these together — in fact, most IT leaders (97%) believe this approach offers real benefits.
Subhash Ramachandran
SVP , Product Management, Software AG

MICROSERVICES AND DEVOPS CONVERGE

As we look forward to 2022, more organizations will implement microservices and will need to keep the DevOps mentality top of mind in order to succeed. Microservices and DevOps will continue to converge and become more complicated to manage as time goes on with multiple layers of architecture.
Prashanth Nanjundappa
Senior Director and Head of Chef Products, Progress

OBSERVABILITY TACKLES MICROSERVICES

Containers and microservices is a subject talked about for probably five plus years now. We are actually seeing larger organizations moving to full containerized product workload, some orchestrated by Kubernetes. This is great to see! What's built in Dev is identical to that which is deployed and run in production. A challenge associated with this is observability. As we break monoliths into many, 10s, 100s of smaller isolated units of change (microservices), how do we observe them effectively? How can we manage risk and detect intrusions in such a complex mesh of microservices? The data is there! Let's use it to effectively map the connections, the vulnerabilities in the containers that form these microservices. After all, we are human, not designed to track huge data accurately every hour of every day. Automation and integrated intelligence has never been so important. This will only become more prevalent as we move into 2022 and beyond.
Ryan Sheldrake
Field CTO, Lacework
DevOps Institute Ambassador

FOCUS ON COMBINATION OF MICROSERVICES, CONTAINERS, CLOUD AND LEGACY SYSTEMS

The future here is extremely mixed. More organizations are absolutely going to adopt containers, especially for development. As organizations get comfortable with the idea of containers, you're also going to see expansion of microservices. Yet, microservices are also causing the code and structures we build to become ever more complex. As systems get more complex, they're more subject to failure. The coming year, and probably years afterwards, will see us focusing our time and efforts on mechanisms and methodologies to stabilize and secure the combination of microservices, containers, cloud platforms and legacy systems.
Grant Fritchey
Product Advocate, Redgate

SLOW MICROSERVICE ADOPTION

More enterprises will begin to understand how inherently complex microservices are when used at scale. To position themselves for success, organizations will start by leveraging language-agnostic, autonomous and independently deployable microservices at a smaller scale (starting with 2-3 components and not scaling out horizontally). Developers will pay attention to each module, make sure microservices are unit testable and loosely coupled — that way, if one microservice relies on other types of data and the model needs to be changed, other microservices won't be impacted. Moving forward — testing, planning, attention to detail, ensuring each component is autonomous and educating all developers on proper microservices approaches will be key to successful adoption.
Eric Bishard
Senior Developer Advocate, Couchbase

Microservices interest many companies, but migrating existing applications is difficult, the patterns for using microservices with data stores and still managing large volumes of data is challenging. Developers would like to adopt this pattern, but I see many struggling to actually understand how to follow best, or even good, practices. I suspect this area continues to grow, but like containers, it will take a few more years until a majority of developers can build and deploy high-performance applications. Like DevOps, a few leaders here are having success, and the more they share information, the more likely we will see a wider set of companies start to adopt this pattern of application development.
Steve Jones
DevOps Advocate, Redgate

GITOPS

With the rise of microservices, we are seeing more and more tools and frameworks emerging that are trying to tame the current microservices chaos. The biggest game changer among these is GitOps, which is already changing the paradigm and will help shape the microservices as code concept in 2022.
Itiel Shwartz,
CTO and Co-Founder, Komodor

Bubbling competition over developer talent will come to a head in 2022, driving DevOps-driven organizations to streamline GitOps and AppOps approaches as a way to offer more enjoyable developer experiences. Today, GitOps implementations require close DevOps support or developer platforms to make infrastructure automation anything-but-cumbersome for developers. Absent this support, developers must tinker with complex Helm charts...far from how they want to be spending their time. Developer platform strategies that eliminate much of this work with well-defined application frameworks will help smooth the control of application deployments, network policies, and registry controls in 2022. Centralized AppOps will also automate support for any infrastructure. The result for DevOps: better developer experiences, recruitment, and retention.
Bruno Andrade
CEO, Shipa.io

AUTONOMOUS APPS

Not everyone is ready or able to shift to microservices architecture to take advantage of independent and easy changeout of services for their applications, and autonomous apps will begin to offer an alternative. As DPA platforms become able to bundle up each app with all its resources and with its own runtime, we'll be seeing lighter, fully autonomous business apps independently deployable anywhere. For the DevOps team, this means fewer headaches: changes to one app do not affect others, so we expect to see a reduced need for coordination and testing among the development and ops teams when doing updates to their business applications that span the enterprise.
Nicolas Chabanoles
CTO, Bonitasoft

Go to: 2022 DevOps Predictions - Part 5, covering automation.