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DEVOPSdigest asked DevOps experts — analysts and consultants, users and the top vendors — for their predictions on how DevOps and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2019. Part 2 covers DevOps culture and people.
Start with 2019 DevOps Predictions - Part 1
CULTURE OF SHARED RESPONSIBILITY
DevOps is about people, process and tools. For any DevOps initiative, the people and process need to come first to deliver the most value. In 2019, we will see enterprises place increasing emphasis on fostering a culture of shared responsibility for delivering across the complex application pipelines. These teams require visibility into collaboration and progress. For the initiatives to succeed, the key is to share the results of the effort with the company as a whole, as the projects progress. After all, there are few better ways inspire the teams than with evidence that their efforts are delivering key results.
TJ Randall
VP of Customer Success, XebiaLabs
THE END OF SILOS
For 2019, we can expect to see A breakdown of organizational siloes. As exhibited by organizations shifting left, embracing DevOps, and integrating web performance management, teams will become less and less siloed, so that interoperability can empower efficiency and optimization for application development and performance.
Denis Goodwin
Director of Product Management, AlertSite by SmartBear
2019 will result in the demise of silos. IT teams will be increasingly multifunctional with analysts, designers, dev, test, ops, and business becoming a part of them. With these experts working alongside product owners, there'll be less be less silos, less handoffs, and more loosely coupled team structures.
Raj Fowler
Principal DevOps Consultant, DevOpsGroup
DEVOPS GOES BEYOND IT
With DevOps transformations well under way in the largest organizations, they will experience impacts beyond just “IT” or software development. They will begin to realize that other functions from marketing to legal to compliance must be transformed to work with a continuous delivery model. Fixed contracts, long lead times and delays in these other areas will sap the impact of continuous delivery and DevOps if they are not examined and addressed.
Christina Noren
CPO, CloudBees
FOCUS ON DEVELOPERS
Many of the DevOps discussions over the past few years have focused on business models and technology. However, a key ingredient for successful DevOps is often not given the attention it deserves: talented, well-resourced developers. Given the extraordinary business value they can deliver, we expect to see organizations treat them more like high-performance athletes and empower them to deliver more functionality in less time without sacrificing quality. We also see movement towards a culture of continuous improvement that rewards developers, across all areas and platforms, when they deliver innovation that really moves the needle for the business.
Christopher O'Malley
CEO, Compuware
RISE OF THE DEVOPS ENGINEER
In 2019, the DevOps Engineer title will become more prevalent and critical to the success of a DevOps initiative. However, companies will need to be careful when hiring for this position and should look for candidates who have both maturely developed soft skills (leadership, collaboration, etc.) and technical skills (development technologies, deployment environments, etc.). DevOps Engineer will be a more coveted title in 2019 and candidates will have to bolster their resumes to get the job.
Jonathan Fries
VP Engineering and Digital Transformation, Exadel
RISE OF THE SRE
In 2019 we will see 25% or more of those with "DevOps" in their titles shift towards using SRE titles as they become more fashionable, similar to the newest gadget of choice. While this makes more sense for a title, it doesn't mean these organizations have evolved in managing and operating as an SRE team.
Jonah Kowall
VP of Market Development and Insights, AppDynamics
2019 is the year that SRE reaches mainstream awareness in the enterprise. SRE is the recipe for the high-velocity operations needed to complete DevOps and Digital Transformations.
Damon Edwards
Co-Founder, Rundeck
DEVOPS JOB CHANGES
More development, testing, operations, and CISO-like people will change jobs in 2019 than ever before. As the DevOps culture-change wave rolls through most every company on the planet, those individuals who can't make the culture shift will have to move along.
Sammy Migues
Principal Scientist, Synopsys
DEVOPS NEEDS T-SHAPED PROFESSIONALS
The need for upskilled and cross-skilled talent is on the rise in 2019 as the market recognizes the need for T-shaped professionals whose core competence (the stem) is supplemented by a broad scope of other knowledge including soft skills (top of the T). Skilling is a human endeavor that supports both transformational and cultural goals. Since the lack of new skills is a recognized constraint, then the investment in people will continue to be perhaps the most significant to a DevOps transformation as the investment in practices of automation.
Jayne Groll
CEO, DevOps Institute
DEVOPS-AS-A-SERVICE
In 2019, I expect to see an expansion of the idea of DevOps-as-a-Service. It can be difficult for an organization that either doesn't have many developers or perhaps doesn't have the breadth of skills to kickstart a DevOps journey, which is where DevOps-as-a-Service providers come in. The organization looking to fill in their DevOps skills gaps would purchase a subscription from a provider who would then send in and manage the teams needed to get a DevOps transformation off the ground. DevOps-as-a-Service models will come to the forefront to help organizations leverage this strategy even when they may not have the requisite internal resources.
Dmitry Binunsky
VP Products and Platforms, Exadel
We see clients quickly moving toward an as-a-service hybrid cloud model. Companies are starting to see cloud more as a true platform to build and deploy cloud native services and applications and less as an infrastructure provider. CI/CD, pipelines, Infrastructure as Code, APIs and micro-services are best practices fully adopted by the clients who are accelerating their digital transformation. This adoption curve is quickly pushing service providers to completely revisit the way they are delivering services and the associated resources. Managed services for applications is no longer about break-fix time but actual continuous deployment of your application code. To accomplish this you need Agile Software Developers and product managers that own the software lifecycle. I believe 2019 will be a very strategic year where we will see service providers massively re-inventing themselves as DevOps-centric organizations to better serve their clients in climbing up the cloud value chain.
Jerome Sandrini
VP & Head of Big Data, Atos North America
BEWARE OF DEVOPS GURUS
Judging by some of the resumes I've been seeing, 2019 will be the year many companies get burned by hiring self-proclaimed “gurus” who only see DevOps as a buzzword they can use to command a high salary. Beyond that list of the latest DevOps tools, can they really use them to deliver ROI? Can they explain how to optimize a value stream or automate a deployment pipeline? DevOps isn't about implementing a technology — it's about reducing friction to value, reducing manual processes, and making teams more productive and happier. Hire carefully!
Nate Berent-Spillson
Senior Delivery Director, Nexient
VALUE STREAM MANAGEMENT
As speed and quality of software delivery are now massive competitive advantages for large enterprises, more organizations will look to value stream mapping to understand whether they're connecting the dots between their software development and overall business value. This shift will reduce waste across the software release pipeline and create greater cross-functional team collaboration.
Lisa Wells
VP of Product Marketing, XebiaLabs
In 2019, there will be an increase in executive involvement in DevOps, whereby, organizations want to make sure software is not only delivered on time, but that it satisfies business goals and customer expectations. Thus, the question of being able to scale both up to the project portfolio and across the organization will be paramount. As a result, a common language around Value Stream Management will enable software teams to better align with company management.
Eric Robertson
VP of Product Marketing Management, CollabNet VersionOne
2019 will be the year of up-leveling in the development process so that teams and organizations can maximize the efficiencies and benefits of their value stream. The goal for all organizations should be understanding how to demonstrate to customers the key steps in the process while also showing which steps actually offer any real value to the process. Organizations will have to learn to take a step back, look at the big picture and identify areas for improvement as well as those not integral to the process.
Jeff Keyes
Director of Product Development, Plutora
Read 2019 DevOps Predictions - Part 3, covering the development process.
Industry News
Red Hat and Oracle announced the expansion of their alliance to offer customers a greater choice in deploying applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). As part of the expanded collaboration, Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes for architecting, building, and deploying cloud-native applications, will be supported and certified to run on OCI.
Harness announced the availability of Gitness™, a freely available, fully open source Git platform that brings a new era of collaboration, speed, security, and intelligence to software development.
Oracle announced new application development capabilities to enable developers to rapidly build and deploy applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Sonar announced zero-configuration, automatic analysis for programming languages C and C++ within SonarCloud.
DataStax announced a new JSON API for Astra DB – the database-as-a-service built on the open source Apache Cassandra® – delivering on one of the most highly requested user features, and providing a seamless experience for Javascript developers building AI applications.
Mirantis launched Lens AppIQ, available directly in Lens Desktop and as (Software as a Service) SaaS.
Buildkite announced the company has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Packagecloud, a cloud-based software package management platform, in an all stock deal.
CrowdStrike has agreed to acquire Bionic, a provider of Application Security Posture Management (ASPM).
Perforce Software announces BlazeMeter's Test Data Pro, the latest addition to its continuous testing platform.
CloudBees announced a new cloud native DevSecOps platform that places platform engineers and developer experience front and center.
Akuity announced a new open source tool, Kargo, to implement change promotions across many application life cycle stages using GitOps principles.
Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. announced that it has been recognized on Newsweek’s inaugural list of the World’s Most Trustworthy Companies 2023.
CloudBees announced significant performance and scalability breakthroughs for Jenkins® with new updates to its CloudBees Continuous Integration (CI) software.