DEVOPSdigest

The following are 2017 predictions for DevOps from the executive team at XebiaLabs, covering Analytics, Monitoring, Big Data, Serverless, Container Orchestration and more:

Analytics and Monitoring Become Critical in Software Development

Analytics and monitoring in software development will become more important. Automated processes produce large amounts of data (just like in IoT), and we're automating software releases more and more. Critical information needed to manage releases is being produced in large volume and scattered over a vast array of tools. Teams will need to be able to summarize that data clearly for business reporting, and identify and highlight unusual or surprising data for further investigation related to operations, usage, what's working/what's not.
Tim Buntel, VP of Products, XebiaLabs

Big Data Presents New Challenges

The number of data science/big data projects will increase and will have their own specific challenges around testing, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. Greater business focus on these projects will reinforce the adoption of cluster managers, since most big data frameworks run on one of these.
Andrew Phillips, VP DevOps Strategy, XebiaLabs

Serverless Architectures Grow in Popularity

Use of Serverless Architectures will expand. Serverless architectures let you run code without provisioning or managing servers, which goes beyond the original promises of PaaS that we have been hearing for years. You don't need a provisioned server, and you don't need an application running all the time. They also provide great horizontal scalability completely automatically. While not new (AWS Lambda was launched in late 2014, for example), next year, we'll start to see them being used more broadly, and not just as an interesting subject for a Meetup talk.
Tim Buntel, VP of Products, XebiaLabs

Next Gen Platforms Focus on Container Orchestration

In 2017, we'll see a new wave of "next gen platform" projects focused on container orchestration frameworks and re-tooled PaaS platforms. Acceptance of the need for a cross-machine resource management and scheduling framework is growing, and the vendor ecosystem is rapidly throwing weight behind this movement. There will also be an increased shift away from defining containers directly, and more towards having containers generated automatically where necessary.

With increased experience of actually implementing next gen platforms and automatically generating containers, there will be greater focus on enterprise concerns, such as access controls, audit trails and network technologies that can implement "virtual firewalls" at the level of the orchestration tier. We'll also start seeing the first wave of "it's much harder than it looks" cases.
Andrew Phillips, VP DevOps Strategy, XebiaLabs

Enterprises Move Apps to New Architectures

Enterprises will invest more in moving apps onto new architectures. The organizational gaps between Legacy (aka "Mature"), Transitioning and Modern application stacks will continue to create stress for companies in areas such as hiring, staff allocation and budgeting. With an increasing number of organizations succeeding at delivering customer-facing solutions on new platforms — for exxample, cloud and containers — companies will invest morre in moving their applications onto these new architectures.
TJ Randall, VP of Customer Success, XebiaLabs

New Way to Define Apps

Defining applications as a set of related processes will be a new de-facto standard. We'll stop defining many apps as essentially "virtual machines definitions," signaling the beginning of the end of the "bake a new AMI for each app version" approach to software delivery.
Andrew Phillips, VP DevOps Strategy, XebiaLabs

Hot Buzzwords: Pipeline and Release Orchestration

Pipeline and release orchestration will be the two hottest buzzwords for the non-Dev folks in the application delivery process, as these approaches provide the consistency in the delivery process that business demands, along with the flexibility that IT teams need to deliver solutions faster.
TJ Randall, VP of Customer Success, XebiaLabs

Derek Langone is CEO of XebiaLabs.