DEVOPSdigest

DevOps experts — analysts and consultants, users and the top vendors — offer thoughtful, insightful, and sometimes controversial predictions on how DevOps and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2018. Part 7 covers DevOps and the cloud.

Start with 2018 DevOps Predictions - Part 1

Start with 2018 DevOps Predictions - Part 2

Start with 2018 DevOps Predictions - Part 3

Start with 2018 DevOps Predictions - Part 4

Start with 2018 DevOps Predictions - Part 5

Start with 2018 DevOps Predictions - Part 6

DEVOPS MOVES TO THE CLOUD

Most DevOps pipelines are on-premise as the average DevOps pipeline has 32+ tools. Given the fragmentation and bespoke nature, most organizations still keep this in-house and on-premise as they are nervous about putting code and other valuable assets in the cloud. In 2018, I believe this will change as DevOps toolchains will consolidate and the greater standardization will enable a move to the cloud. The scale-up of DevOps, as people really deliver daily across multiple product lines, is going to be hardware intensive and will push people to the cloud. DevOps pipelines will move under proper IT management and this will push DevOps to the organizations standard IT infrastructure, which will be in the cloud. So DevOps will take to the skies in 2018.
Antony Edwards
CTO, Testplant

The pressure to accelerate delivery and deployment of applications, while increasing quality and cutting costs, will continue to grow. You will see more applications moving to the cloud together with an increase in delivering services through virtualized data centers and networks. To maximize business results, an application assurance and security strategy predicated on pervasive visibility and smart data is needed to scale at a blistering pace, reduce complexity and improve performance.
Ron Lifton
Senior Solutions Marketing Manager, NetScout

DEVOPS AND HYBRID CLOUD

DevOps has emerged in conjunction with public cloud. Most early advocates of DevOps used public cloud to prove the case. But most production IT organizations require hybrid environments. Mainstream DevOps will be hybrid.
Tom Joyce
CEO, Pensa

MULTI-CLOUD STRATEGY

In the coming year, quickly delivered apps that delight users will be a key touchstone for developers, and IT leadership must put agile, open and flexible environments in place to enable this rapid app development. Because of this, I expect to see more and more businesses adopting a multi-cloud strategy rather than locking themselves in to one hyperscale cloud vendor and their finite set of platform services. This multi-cloud agility for rapid app delivery will lead to new unique innovations and business model transformations in 2018, as organizations will have more freedom to create and reinvent than ever before.
Dan Lahl
Global VP, SAP Cloud Platform Product Marketing

CLOUD-NATIVE

The cloud-native experiment will go live. The cloud-native world, defined by containers, DevOps, continuous delivery methods and microservices, has seeded itself in more than 80 percent of large enterprises but often at just an experimental capacity. That won't be good enough anymore. In 2018, many more companies will shift from their legacy environments to hybrid or even fully cloud-native approaches. Companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon were at the forefront of the cloud-native movement building highly scalable, dynamic applications and in 2018 any corporation looking to utilize technology as a strategic advantage will rebuild their application stack and move toward a cloud-native approach. This, of course, means security teams will need to rethink their security strategy for this stateless world or stateful/stateless hybrid world, which has been one of the main issues holding a number of these companies back, but the value of the cloud-native environment is too much to ignore.
John Viega
CEO and Co-Founder, Capsule8

SERVERLESS ARCHITECTURE

Serverless architecture proliferates within organizations: As cloud technology has matured, serverless architecture has surfaced to compose reactive architectures that drive smaller, more efficient services. Serverless architecture will constitute the next infrastructure overhaul at the application layer, especially as DevOps seeks to drive business value in new ways. 2018 will see serverless architecture spike in adoption, and new use cases will emerge to assemble — and disassemble — the stack in ways that haven't been possible before.
Ravi Mayuram
SVP of Engineering and CTO, Couchbase

Read 2018 DevOps Predictions - Part 8, the final installment, covering testing.