DEVOPSdigest

DevOps experts — analysts and consultants, users and the top vendors — offer thoughtful, insightful, often controversial and sometimes contradictory predictions on how DevOps and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2017. Part 3 is all about the cloud.

Start with 2017 DevOps Predictions - Part 1

Start with 2017 DevOps Predictions - Part 2

20. THE RISE OF SERVERLESS

The rise of serverless will be an important factor in DevOps, with the first big enterprise adopters. APM solutions will be a vital instrument in helping make that shift.
Gergely Nemeth
CEO and Co-Founder, RisingStack(link is external)

I think the market will move more to abstracted compute resources. There's no future where there's less servers, but there is a future where servers are managed by somebody else. 2017 will see more lambdas/server-less computing, but not mainstream yet.
Carlos Sanchez
Software Engineer, CloudBees(link is external)

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. 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(link is external)

See More Predictions from XebiaLabs

21. PAAS CATCHES UP

PaaS will finally catch up, thanks to containers and container orchestration engines making cluster computing a commodity, whether it runs on public cloud or internally. Managing the migration from previous architectures and the expectations set by continuous delivery paradigms will be a challenge for many enterprises. Everyone talks about containers. It became so huge that we think containers exist for a long time. The fact is that it has only started.
Carlos Sanchez
Software Engineer, CloudBees(link is external)

Cloud will be the platform for any new development with it's platform as a service offering allowing companies to innovate and bring products to market faster. The focus will be on software and applications and less on infrastructure.
Hamesh Chawla
VP of Engineering, Zephyr(link is external)

22. IAAS CONTINUES TO DOMINATE

IaaS platforms continue to eat the DevOps world: AWS, Azure and Google will continue to launch tools that bring DevOps functionality that is currently provided by 3rd parties into their core platform. Expect these platforms to continue to launch tools for optimizing building and deploying applications.
Damian Roskill
CMO, AppNeta(link is external)

23. DEVOPS DRIVES CLOUD NATIVE TECHNOLOGY

At the bleeding edge, DevOps is driving cloud native technology adoption and large enterprises will have some capability in this area, particularly with new products/services, while struggling to maintain and connect legacy systems. 2017 will see the awareness of cloud native technologies as the fulfillment of the agile and DevOps journey.
Michael Azoff
Principal Analyst, Ovum(link is external)

24. CLOUD VISIBILITY BECOMES ESSENTIAL

Cloud Visibility Becomes Critical to Success of DevOps Approach to Digital Services: DevOps teams are increasingly using the cloud's PaaS capabilities together with third-party components to develop composite applications faster. According to Sonatype, the average enterprise downloads more than 229,000 components annually, of which one in 16 has security defects. Third-party components account for 80% - 90% of the code in a typical enterprise application today. Current monitoring for components traces app transactions through server interactions, which obscures dependencies within the app layer. Prediction: Enterprises will seek new solutions that provide clear visibility into the behavior and interaction of third-party components and platforms in cloud-based environments in order to accelerate development of apps and digital services in the cloud, proactively prevent performance issues, and improve performance of cloud-based apps.
Sean Applegate
Sr. Director, Technology Strategist, Riverbed(link is external)

24. HOLISTIC VIEW ACROSS MULTIPLE CLOUDS AND HYBRID ENVIRONMENTS

Tooling that can work with multiple cloud providers and paradigms will become critically important in 2017. As major cloud providers are all becoming mature, reasonable targets to put your workloads, companies will be on the lookout for single tools they can use across clouds versus cloud-specific solutions.
Mitchell Hashimoto
Co-Founder and CTO, HashiCorp(link is external)

As more IT Shops adopt container technology, the DevOps team will feel the infrastructure clash in the cloud. They will need to solve for the complexity that the highly integrated everything-as-a-service applications create across multiple clouds, services, and infrastructures. Containers more likely will be used in hybrid environments to include containerized, virtual, physical environments. The stateless and stateful part of the application will have different infrastructures. The service itself could be part monolith and part micro-service with a subset of the functions based on micro-service architecture, say the review service. This in-itself will make it more difficult for companies to manage these "mixed" services. Companies will need to take a combination of immutable and traditional approach to management. The key to success is going to be to have a holistic view of the application across both legacy and cloud environments.
Paul Mansfield
CTO, iQuate(link is external)

25. HYBRID SANDBOX RELEVANT TO DEVOPS

With hybrid clouds, creating complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments with consistent DevOps, visibility, security etc. will make hybrid sandboxes more relevant.

Shashi Kiran
CMO, Quali(link is external)

26. DEVOPS MIGRATES TO CLOUD PROVIDERS

In 2017 we expect to see an acceleration of DevOps continuing to move directly into cloud providers application layers handling ever more complex workloads. As DevOps continues to make strides within technology organizations, cloud providers will constantly look to completely automate that functionality. This will continue in 2017 as more complex and discrete workloads and processes.
Moisey Uretsky
Co-Founder, DigitalOcean(link is external)

Read 2017 DevOps Predictions - Part 4, covering containers and microservices.