DEVOPSdigest

Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how DevOps and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2020. Part 3 covers DevOps tools.

Start with 2020 DevOps Predictions - Part 1

Start with 2020 DevOps Predictions - Part 2

CHANGING DEFINITION OF A MODERN APPLICATION

Today's applications are more complex than those of yesterday. In 2020, modern apps will power tomorrow's innovation and this requires a diverse set of tools, languages and frameworks for developers. Developers need even more flexibility to address this new wave of modern apps and evolve with the rest of the industry.
Scott Johnston
CEO, Docker

TOOL SPRAWL

Tool sprawl will continue to increase but DevOps management platforms will emerge: With continued adoption of cloud and micro services architectures, new tools will continue to emerge — different teams within an organization will often have different tools for planning, version control, build automation, testing, deployment, etc. But, there will be a movement toward platforms that streamline management across various tools and teams to improve development speed and agility.
RJ Jainendra
VP and GM, IT Business Management and DevOps, ServiceNow

The plethora of tools, languages, and frameworks are adding massive complexity to the application development ecosystem. IT teams are challenged to interconnect these disparate languages and platforms to build applications that are the lifeblood of business in today's digital economy. And while conference halls echo with cries of tool and framework fatigue, there will not be a clear resolution in 2020. In fact, there will likely be more disruption.
Davie Cramer
CEO, Sentry

TOOL CONSOLIDATION

We'll continue to see tool consolidation as more DevOps companies are acquired or expand their offerings to offer the experience of multiple apps in one. The market will have less tolerance for a fragmented experience that requires a lot of integration work. They'll demand seamless workflows across the software development life cycle. In particular, operations tooling for observability will expand into other stages to drive insights and optimization for planning, development, and CI/CD.
William Chia
Senior Product Marketing Manager, GitLab

END-TO-END LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT

A focus on end-to-end lifecycle management will streamline DevOps workflow complexity. With the emergence of microservices and CI/CD toolchains, there has been an emphasis on developing and leveraging many different tools to tackle small tasks spread across similar parallel workflows. For example, two different teams within an organization often have their own CI/CD pipelines consisting of many different tools catering to version control, build automation, monitoring analytics, early testing, code review processes, and more. While organizations have reaped the benefits of catering to customized workflows, this has also led to incredible tool sprawl within often dispersed teams that can hinder productivity. DevOps vendors are often tasked with ensuring compatibility with tools from other vendors. In 2020, the number of tools will continue to increase, but there will be a movement toward end-to-end lifecycle management and single applications that streamline tooling and workflows to ultimately improve software development speed and agility.
Sid Phadkar
Senior Product Manager, Akamai

DEVELOPER DECISION-MAKING

Developers on the front lines will have a larger role in deciding what technology enterprises choose to adopt in 2020 and beyond. We've seen this trend begin the rise of open-source software, which appeals to developers because they can start playing with it immediately and test it out on new projects, without having to commit to a lengthy corporate evaluation and purchase process. As the pace of software development accelerates and the pool of useful solutions becomes exponentially larger, front-line developers' intimate knowledge of the products in their niche becomes even more important. They know the products inside and out and have unique insight into how they perform and can contribute to specific business goals.
Paul Dix
CTO and Co-founder, InfluxData

MINIMIZING COSTS

As the economy becomes more unstable, organizations will look to validate and optimize the value their DevOps tooling provides at scale. Organizations everywhere are going to seek ways to cut costs without cutting output to weather the storm. Cloud-first and digital transformation initiatives within organizations have typically been given a free hand on budgetary needs over the last few years. At the same time, the maturity of DevOps tooling has meant that these tools have evolved and are now leveraged at scale and getting costlier every day. In 2020, organizations will have a significant focus on cost structures and will look to leverage DevOps tooling that provides equivalent value, but minimizes costs at scale.
Sid Phadkar
Senior Product Manager, Akamai

DEV TOOLS TEAM

As DevOps continues to mature and more software development teams leverage it as a delivery strategy in 2020, I next foresee large organizations (with tens of development teams) requiring a dedicated Dev Tools and Standards team that more formally builds in governance and best practices around DevOps strategy. Such teams will build a suite of tooling, CI/CD pipelines, and security policies and frameworks that can be used by multiple software development teams within an organization — making them both productive and consistent in their software delivery.
Kaushik Mysur
Director of Product Management, Instaclustr

FEATURE FLAGS

Commercial feature flag solutions, having proved they can deliver scalable and reliable control of feature exposure, will grow up in 2020 and begin delivering self awareness features aimed at monitoring and experimentation. In their infant stage, feature flag-as-a-service providers proved they could decouple deployment from release, freeing software teams to embrace trunk-based development. Now the race will be towards addressing the application performance management (APM) blindspot created by partial rollouts and delivering on end-to-end experimentation capabilities.
Dave Karow
Continuous Delivery Evangelist, Split.io

Go to 2020 DevOps Predictions - Part 4, covering analytics and automation.