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 6, the final installment, covers DevOps tools and DevOps people.

Start with 2017 DevOps Predictions - Part 1

Start with 2017 DevOps Predictions - Part 2

Start with 2017 DevOps Predictions - Part 3

Start with 2017 DevOps Predictions - Part 4

Start with 2017 DevOps Predictions - Part 5

45. COMPOSABLE TOOL CHAINS

Traditional development vendors, including ITIL practitioners will increasingly try and re-frame DevOps in legacy terms, while enterprises seeking to gain advantage, will embrace change enabled through composable tool chains. In particular, 2017 will see significant growth in "Software Defined."
Richard Whitehead
Chief Evangelist, Moogsoft(link is external)

46. CONSOLIDATION OF TOOLS

I expect consolidation of tools across production and pre-production environments across the DevOps value chain.
Shashi Kiran
CMO, Quali(link is external)

47. REBIRTH OF LEGACY TOOLS

The term "legacy" has traditionally been a scary word for developers, perceived as locked-in technology assets that most are unfamiliar with, or perhaps even terrified to change or work on. The problem is, some of these so-called legacy technologies, such as COBOL code, are important – even irreplaceable – components of modern transactional applications. According to a recent survey of executives at organizations using mainframes, attempts to create workarounds or migrate to new platforms often results in added costs, lack of agility and unintended consequences. We believe that in the future, more organizations will realize this, and instead of looking to replace their legacy systems, will extend DevOps best practices across all the platforms developers work on, new and old. This will help them achieve faster, higher-quality results while supporting better collaboration, particularly as development teams work on applications spanning multiple platforms. Once this happens, the attitude around legacy will soften, and a new generation of tools and solutions will help transform legacy, "hands-off" systems, into modern and flexible platforms for innovation.
Christopher O'Malley
President and CEO, Compuware(link is external)

48. THE NEED FOR MORE POWERFUL TOOLS

I believe that tools will need to become even more powerful in 2017, and the successful tools will be ones that work for the developer rather than the other way around. Tools will need to be smarter to learn from the user automatically, proactive to inform the user automatically, collaborative to connect users with others, and visual and tangible to show and manipulate. This meta-increase in toolsets is possible now for a number of reasons. Memory, processing power, and connectivity speed continue to explode, while at the same time visual tools (like 4K screens) get better and better. Plus, the continued rise of social coding increases the need to powerful collaborative tools to support the developer.
Abhinav Asthana
CEO, Postman(link is external)

49. OPEN SOURCE TOOLS SUPPORT DEVOPS

In 2016 we saw the rise of of DevOps tools, both open-source and proprietary. In the next year I expect more and more open-source solutions, which will help make developers life a lot easier with automation.
Gergely Nemeth
CEO and Co-Founder, RisingStack(link is external)

The Future belongs to Open Source Tools: The next decade (may be more!) will see a lot of Open source tools in action as more and more organizations will adopt them for proper implementation of Agile, DevOps, and Test Automation. Support communities for the open source tools can only become more and more involved and active.
Kalyana Rao Konda
President and Global Head, Gallop Solutions(link is external)

50. PAY AS YOU GO

DevOps will extend into pay-as-you-go: We will see more cloud implementations of DevOps to meet the needs for an on demand model. Technology solutions which orchestrate across cloud providers will only accelerate that adoption by eliminating the risk of cloud provider locking. Customers can easily switch over to a low cost provider and benefit from the elastic nature of the cloud pricing model.
Tan Moorthy
Head of Global Services for Application Development and Management (ADM), Infosys(link is external)

51. SOFTWARE TESTING BUDGETS WILL GROW

Software Testing Budgets will continue to grow: It is but obvious that with such huge focus and demand for high quality products, and with major IT trends such as BigData analytics, Cloud Technologies, Mobility, and Virtualization, Testing has become more than just a need. This will push the organizations towards allocating a bigger chunk of their IT budget (around 40%) for software testing and QA.
Kalyana Rao Konda
President and Global Head, Gallop Solutions(link is external)

52. DEVOPS ADOPTION IN LARGE ENTERPRISES

DevOps will move to the enterprise: The next phase of DevOps will see an increased adoption from large enterprises. So far large enterprises have been experimenting with DevOps in discrete projects. But they have started to plan for employing DevOps principles at enterprise-level, and we will see this roll out next year.
Tan Moorthy
Head of Global Services for Application Development and Management (ADM), Infosys(link is external)

What I think we will see in 2017, is an acceleration of the adoption of DevOps, especially within enterprises as the largest enterprise software companies continue developing their DevOps tool set.
Vincent Geffray
Senior Director of Product Marketing, IT Alerting and IoT, Everbridge(link is external)

Read Vincent Geffray's blog: Everbridge: DevOps Outlook for 2017

53. DEVOPS ADOPTION IN SMALL TEAMS AND SMB

In 2017 a higher percentage of organizations will be successful in cultural change and agility by moving quickly on specific products with small teams. Unfortunately, this extends the bifurcation between the two modes of IT. Although this situation is not ideal it does present a stepping stone for improvements.
Jonah Kowall
VP of Market Development and Insights, AppDynamics(link is external)

Increased DevOps Adoption Among Small IT Teams: The increasing importance and widespread adoption of DevOps became apparent in 2016 with Gartner's release of the Hype Cycle for DevOps, 2016. This marked the first Hype Cycle devoted to this focus area. Now, with the technologies and methodologies that support a DevOps initiative laid before them, 2017 will see an influx of smaller IT teams shifting their development strategies to mirror the processes pioneered by enterprises. Successful implementation of both DevOps culture and technology will help smaller IT organizations leverage agile development to not only improve time to market, but increase their business value as well.
Eileen O'Loughlin
Market Researcher, Software Advice(link is external) (a Gartner Company)

DevOps, finally, is making meaningful inroads in medium and even small businesses, and will continue to do so in 2017. Previously, many of these organizations overlooked DevOps because they don't do much Dev, and continuous integration (CI) isn't of interest. However, smaller teams do plenty of deployment and config, and Agile, continuous development (CD) and two-pizza teams really can reduce errors, speed deployment and get boring, cost center IT some positive attention from executives. A little Kanban for SQL Server 2016 migration never hurt anyone.
Patrick Hubbard
Head Geek, SolarWinds(link is external)

54. DEVELOPER TALENT IS TOP PRIORITY

While developing and building relationships with customers over the last year, I've learned that many executives' number one challenge is finding quality software developers. Today, we live and work in a world where there continues to be massive growth in technological advances and an explosion of technical choices. In this world, developers – specifically, software developers wielding web technology skills and tools that turn ideas into amazing applications which drive operations and businesses around the planet – rule. According to the previously cited Dimensional Research survey, 76 percent of organizations plan to increase investment in web technologies in 2017. Hiring and retaining quality developer talent will become even more critical as organizations feel the increasing pressure to deliver sophisticated, complex and long-lasting applications quickly, while still providing high quality, long-lived products.
Art Landro
CEO, Sencha(link is external)

55. MERGING TEAMS

DevOps requires the unification of IT architecture, development, testing, and operations. While tools and technologies are enabling the fusion of these IT processes, businesses also need to bring together the IT teams responsible for these components to see true value. It is essential to merge the human teams along with the processes and technologies for DevOps to succeed. 2017 will be the year when IT organizations come together to embrace the DevOps models.
Frank Yue
Director of Application Delivery Solutions, Radware(link is external)

56. CULTURE RECOGNIZED AS THE DEVOPS DIFFERENTIATOR

Culture is going to truly be recognized as a DevOps differentiator. Enterprises sometimes use the same orchestration platform, or a lot of the same tools, but the outcomes are radically different. The differentiator usually comes down to culture. So it's the people that espouse some of these cultural tenets, the shared responsibility, the truly empowered autonomous teams, the can-do attitude, continuous learning that are going to get the best benefits.
Steve Brodie
CEO, Electric Cloud(link is external)

Thanks to all the experts for their excellent predictions.

To all the readers, sponsors and contributors of DEVOPSdigest: Have a Happy Holiday Season and a Successful 2017 ...