2019 DevOps Predictions from Akamai
January 22, 2019

Ari Weil
Akamai

The following are 2019 DevOps predictions from Akamai:

OOTB INTEGRATIONS

Experience value will transition to platform value with IT leaders demanding out-of-the-box integrations. CIOs and architects will grow weary of the "Wild Wild West" of DevOps toolchains and begin mandating standardized integrations with proven scale in the form of available support and operations expertise. This will accelerate the consolidation of adjacent and niche solutions as medium and large businesses demand standardization and ecosystem integrations from the major players in the industry.

COMPETITIVE DISRUPTIONS DRIVES DEVOPS

Competitive disruption will drive remaining laggards to a DevOps boiling point. As the industry moves to the plateau of productivity with DevOps automation and standard tooling, laggard executives will reach a management crisis point that will force actions. Mainframe-centric, heavily regulated, and even businesses that have historically not identified the external catalyst for transformation will awaken to the reality of missed business opportunities if they fail to adapt architectures and processes to embrace cloud technologies and modern ways of developing and deploying technology. Developing nations and a backlash against nationalism will drive a global move to leverage technology to open and mature key markets, which will shine a spotlight on the last bastions of waterfalls and walled gardens.

MAJOR BREACH

A major breach will result in a massive fine or fallout in the user community. As businesses continue to evolve existing processes and encourage experimentation and scale through DevOps initiatives, the "healthy" friction from misaligned team values will force behaviors that will ultimately result in exposure in the form of a significant data breach. Whereas governance and oversight have been seen as an anathema to agile teams (because they assume legacy controls applied to modern workflows), the industry will begin to reconcile how controls can enable agility, not restrict it. This will result in the industry revisiting the notion of DevSecOps and redoubling efforts in awareness, education, and enablement.

SKILLS GAP

Skills gaps for key versatilist positions will bring new legitimacy to managed services. After key roles and skills go unfilled through the first quarter of 2019, businesses will come to appreciate staffing versatilist roles from a managed service provider. The complexity of cloud orchestration, API-driven integrations, and custom logic will require investments in key areas of differentiation while leaving gaps in the critical functions to integrate and operate heterogeneous deployments — the bread and butter of cloud and other PaaS and IaaS vendors.

AGILITY REDEFINED

Stumbles will level set what "agility" really means for DevOps. Agility is defined as the ability to move quickly and easily. For most businesses the holy grail of agility has meant automating continuous release and deployment for applications in order to realize value faster. But as complexity increases exponentially through transformations, integrations, and permutations of what a hybrid deployment look like, the process definitions of the stodgy, legacy enterprise will begin to creep in as knowledge gaps expose businesses to risks and compromise. The trick will be to establish rigor to mitigate risk without resulting in rigor-mortis.

Ari Weil is Global VP of Product and Industry Marketing at Akamai
Share this

Industry News

March 21, 2023

OpenText launched the latest version of ValueEdge -- an innovative modular, cloud-based DevOps and value stream management (VSM) platform.

March 21, 2023

Oracle announced the availability of Java 20, the latest version of the programming language and development platform.

March 21, 2023

Rafay Systems introduced Environment Manager, a solution that empowers enterprise platform teams to improve the developer experience by delivering self-service capabilities for provisioning full-stack environments.

March 20, 2023

To meet the growing demand for Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) with global organizations, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is introducing new capabilities that can boost the reliability and efficiency of large-scale Kubernetes environments while simplifying operations and reducing costs.

March 20, 2023

Perforce Software joined the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Accelerate Program and listed its free Enhanced Studio Pack (ESP) in AWS Marketplace.

March 20, 2023

Aembit, an identity platform that lets DevOps and Security teams discover, manage, enforce, and audit access between federated workloads, announced its official launch alongside $16.6M in seed financing from cybersecurity specialist investors Ballistic Ventures and Ten Eleven Ventures.

March 16, 2023

Hyland released Alfresco Content Services 7.0 – a cloud-native content services platform, optimized for content model flexibility and performance at scale.

March 16, 2023

CAST AI has announced the closing of a $20M investment round.

March 15, 2023

Check Point® Software Technologies introduced Infinity Global Services, an all-encompassing security solution that will empower organizations of all sizes to fortify their systems, from cloud to network to endpoint.

March 15, 2023

OpsCruise's Kubernetes and Cloud Service observability platform is certified to run on the Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes platform.

March 14, 2023

DataOps.live released an update to the DataOps.live platform, delivering productivity for data teams.

March 14, 2023

CoreStack and Zensar announced a strategic global partnership. CoreStack will provide its AI-powered NextGen cloud governance and FinOps capabilities, complementing Zensar’s composable cloud operations offering.

March 14, 2023

Delinea introduced the Delinea Platform, a cloud-native foundation for Delinea's PAM solutions that empowers end-to-end visibility, dynamic privilege controls, and adaptive security.

March 13, 2023

Sysdig announced a new foundation that will serve as the long-term custodian of the Wireshark open source project.

March 13, 2023

Talend announced the latest update to Talend Data Fabric, its end-to-end platform for data discovery, transformation, governance, and sharing.