DEVOPSdigest

Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how DevOps and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2020. Part 2 covers DevOps teams, Database DevOps, and Value Stream Management.

Start with 2020 DevOps Predictions - Part 1

DATABASE DEVOPS

2019 saw the term "Database DevOps" enter normal conversations about DevOps, with the database now being seen as a natural partner. The faster speed of development which it encourages, however, needs to be balanced with the requirement to maintain data privacy. This will come center stage for US businesses in 2020 with the introduction of the California Consumer Privacy Act on 1 January 2020, which matches many of the data protection requirements introduced in the EU by the GDPR. Expect concerns about identifying and cataloging data, and masking personal data when it is used in development, to be the new topics of conversation.
Simon Galbraith
CEO & Co-Founder, Redgate

Moving to cloud will cause a greater adoption of database DevOps. DevOps in and of itself isn't slow, at least at the application and development level, but it's slow on the database side. We're starting to see database DevOps emerge, and in 2020, as more businesses move and migrate to the cloud building and leveraging database as a service (DBaaS) products, we'll see greater acceptance of database DevOps. As things start to change, the culture will fundamentally evolve with the way businesses manage data and the infrastructure they use. The cloud will force this cultural evolution. It will be slow with enterprises but adoption of database DevOps will get faster as businesses adopt and deploy more in the cloud. DBaaS will force adoption of DevOps especially as it relates to automated database patching and updates. In addition, as companies move more of their applications to the cloud and deliver updates an incremental fashion through DevOps on the application level, it will force the database to also embrace DevOps as well as application and database changes that will have to be synchronized and delivered incrementally.
Venkat Rajaji
VP Product Management, Quest Software, Information Management Business Unit

VALUE VS. SPEED

A lot of organizations started down the Agile and DevOps path looking to improve their delivery speed. In 2020, they will shift their focus to measuring and improving the value of what they deliver to customers. When they do, they will find that a lot of their current assumptions about what customers want are wrong, and they will start using their faster delivery capability to learn faster and improve the value of what they deliver.
Kurt Bittner
VP of Enterprise Solutions, Scrum.org

VALUE STREAM MANAGEMENT: BRINGING AGILE AND DEVOPS TOGETHER

In 2019, we've seen growing urgency around digital transformation, and I fully expect that to continue into 2020. As we move into the 11th year since DevOps was born, the need to take agile methodologies to the next level — to scale them to support the largest enterprises — is paramount. 2020 will be the year that Value Stream Management (VSM) will serve as the platform that provides predictive insight and visibility for the entire process from idea to cash. Agile Planning and DevOps will come together to form truly converged pipelines.
Bob Davis
CMO, Plutora

DevOps will continue to improve and be hyper-focused on value streams, Value Stream Management and product-centricity. The results focusing on these concepts will yield more high-performing organizations who are willing to experiment with innovative practices to improve employee and customer experiences. We will continue to see those that have adopted Agile mature into adopting DevOps and all of the technical practices that support DevOps. In the future, it will be difficult to distinguish the difference between Agile and DevOps.
Logan Daigle
DevOps Coach, CollabNet VersionOne

VALUE STREAM MANAGEMENT: NOT THE SOLUTION

The discussion around Value Stream Management, which is derived from Value Stream Mapping, will come back down to earth, and tools vendors and analysts will agree that it is a piece of the solution, not the solution itself.
Brian Dawson
DevOps Evangelist and Product Suite Marketing, CloudBees

DEVOPS TURNS TO SOFTWARE INTELLIGENCE

Rapid delivery with traditional Agile methods and focus on testing functional changes often leads to unintended reliability, security, maintainability flaws and architectural deviations that build up over time. These structural problems omitted in a typical Agile approach begin to cripple any further application changes. Or worse, they can result in performance or security failures. We will see many DevOps teams applying software intelligence capabilities and integrating them into DevOps toolchains for regular comprehensive structural checks to address these limitations of Agile. With MRI-like clarity into the state of data structures, source code components, and all their interdependencies, they will be able to detect and pro-actively address the accumulation of software structural flaws.
Rado Nikolov
EVP, CAST

FRONTEND MEETS DEVOPS

How people interact with a website is no longer just a marketing concern. The user interface is now critical application code and it contains core business logic. This shift in application importance means frontend development teams will start to look more like product teams as development and operations merge. These teams are deploying their own code and making changes so rapidly that they are often moving too fast for separate operations teams to have the full context to mitigate application errors. We will see these frontend teams become more generalized in their skillsets and become responsible for the development, testing and operations as the process becomes a continuous cycle of integration and delivery. These teams will be on call for incidents and interacting more with monitoring tools to ensure uptime. Those writing JavaScript are going to learn about getting paged in the middle of the night.
David Cramer
CEO, Sentry

MARKETING MEETS DEVOPS

In 2020 people will realize that they really have no feedback from production into development. They will start trying to plug marketing and EUEM tools into the development process, but this will be passively resisted by development teams and lead to a major re-organization of development-product-and-marketing teams. By the end of 2020, everyone will be asking where others draw the line between dev and marketing.
Antony Edwards
COO, Eggplant

RETAIL GOES ALL-IN ON DEVOPS

In 2020, more and more retailers will go all-in on DevOps to ensure they show up for their biggest days: Black Friday, online anniversary sales, and so on. We've seen our retail customers double down on DevOps to ensure teams are aligned for their critical digital moments of truth — to avoid the outage crisis that has burned businesses in the past and cost major revenue. DORA's 2019 Accelerate State of DevOps report found that the retail industry had the highest number of DevOps "elite performers."
Tori Wieldt
Sr. Solutions Manager, New Relic

AUTONOMOUS TEAMS

2020 is when the reality of autonomous teams is going to hit. The majority of enterprises are changing their software development organizations to have durable, multi-year funded, 2-pizza sized teams that have transformed from project oriented to real product teams. These teams are self-directed with high-level goals that they will implement iteration after iteration. That transformation is going to be even more pronounced in 2020.
Jeff Keyes
Director of Product Marketing, Plutora

CROSS-FUNCTIONAL TEAMS

In 2020, teams are going to become even more cross-functional, and become concerned not only with moving fast, but actually working better together. That means breaking down functional silos and becoming intentionally more transparent, both internally and externally.
Andrew Childs
Co-Founder, Clubhouse

DEVOPS MARKET CONSOLIDATION

The DevOps market has started to see a slow and steady growth in consolidation. This market will continue to mature and consolidate as customers look for fewer, more cohesive options in a crowded space. Businesses will need to align their product suites and outcomes to customer value if they want to keep up.
Thomas Hooker
VP of Marketing, CollabNet VersionOne

Go to 2020 DevOps Predictions - Part 3, covering DevOps tools.