DEVOPSdigest

The Holiday Season means it is time for DEVOPSdigest's annual list of DevOps predictions. Industry experts — from analysts and consultants to users and the top vendors — offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how DevOps and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2022.

Throughout the year, DEVOPSdigest covers a variety of technologies and subjects, and this year's predictions list offers an equally broad scope of topics. In addition to DevOps in general, topics covered include development, DevSecOps, microservices, containers and Kubernetes, cloud, automation, integration and testing.

Some of these predictions may come true in the next 12 months, while others may be just as valid but take several years to be realized. Still others may be wishful thinking or unbased fears. Several predictions even directly contradict each other. But taken collectively, this list of predictions offers a timely and fascinating snapshot of what the IT industry and the DevOps market are thinking about, planning, expecting and hoping for 2022.

The predictions will be posted in 7 parts over the next two weeks, with separate lists of predictions for Kubernetes, Low Code/No Code, Cloud and DevSecOps to follow after the holidays.

A forecast by the top minds in DevOps today, here are the predictions:

DEVOPS INCREASES DEVELOPER PRODUCTIVITY

Businesses will embrace development platforms to increase developer productivity. With tech giants winning the race for scarce developer talent, businesses outside of the tech elite will embrace new ways to stay innovative and competitive with their own teams. Businesses are waking up to the realization that they need technology that works hard to allow their development teams to focus on creativity and innovation, instead of the tedious aspects of software development. This includes technology that handles the critical but undifferentiated tasks of development, constantly updates with the latest cloud technologies, automatically scales, and leverages containers and Kubernetes to make sure development teams deliver world class application architectures, move fast to meet changing business needs, with low risk. All this while being unencumbered from toil, unnecessary maintenance and technical debt drudgery.
Patrick Jean
CTO, OutSystems(link is external)

DEVELOPMENT PRODUCTIVITY WILL BE MORE MEASURABLE

Organizations and developers will begin to accept more measurement of developer productivity. Historically developers and managers have pushed against the idea of measuring productivity, because metrics have been poorly aligned to true productivity. The ability to measure from line of code to true business productivity that is coming into play will have an impact. And the cost of development will lead to businesses being forced to look at real ROI.
Brian Rue
CEO and Co-Founder, Rollbar(link is external)

The ecosystem of DevOps tooling is immense, overwhelming, and honestly quite unreasonable. Petabytes of data stream through every possible info source, and we're left to sift through this madness with little to no assistance. 2022 will be the year where developers and executives demand clearer signal: deduplication, symbolication, indexing and the elimination of false positives. This work has been underway for years, but 2022 is the breakthrough year, that will show us not only the possibility, but that the market is mature enough to adopt it.
Marcus Merrell
Senior Director of Technology Strategy, Sauce Labs(link is external)

FIFTH PHASE OF THE DEVOPS PLATFORM

In 2022 we'll see many enterprises who find themselves at various phases of the DevOps lifecycle. I believe we'll see a number of companies moving their teams towards platforms — either through DIY or through adoption of a complete DevOps Platform mindset. As we see movement to the platform approach, the fifth phase of the DevOps Platform will come about, which will include increased adoption of cloud technologies for other parts of the development lifecycle such as developers' own environments. Overall, the DevOps Platform allows greater control and visibility into the entire chain of events that combine together to produce and deploy software into production environments. As security continues to be a challenge, this makes the platform approach even more critical for teams considering how to better secure their environments and products.
Brendan O'Leary
Senior Developer Evangelist, GitLab(link is external)

DEVOPS TOOLING CLOSES GAP BETWEEN DEV AND OPS

Over the past few years, we have seen a major shift-left movement take shape. As such, we are seeing more and more companies seeking ways to bridge the gap between dev and ops teams. I believe one way of solving this is by creating or adjusting tools so that they cater to both audiences. DevOps tooling in 2022 will have more of a developer-first approach, combined with ops-level input, which will help close the gap and lead to better productivity.
Itiel Shwartz,
CTO and Co-Founder, Komodor(link is external)

REDUCED NUMBER OF DEVOPS TOOLS

We shouldn't need 50 products to build software — we should need about 4. There will be a coalescing of the development process so that you can move from tons of tools to fewer. There will be a move toward a tightly integrated set of the highest, or best in class tools. As the development process coalesces, your team will automate or eliminate steps in the development process (that you org doesn't need to do manually anymore) and that will mean dropping the tools in the process that go with those steps.
Brian Rue
CEO and Co-Founder, Rollbar(link is external)

DEVOPS TOOLING DECISIONS SHIFT FROM BUILD TO BUY

The average DevOps tool spend will increase because average developer compensation is going up, especially at the highest level, and that is going to shift the balance of build versus buy for tools. Historically developers have often built their own tools but as hiring developers gets expensive, and tools get more sophisticated and standardized, there is a shift from build to buy. And it will be worth buying more effective tools to empower developers to be more productive (and thus cost effective).
Brian Rue
CEO and Co-Founder, Rollbar(link is external)

AI AND ANALYTICS ADVANCE DEVELOPMENT

In the coming year, I anticipate DevOps practices to take a big leap forward with AI & ML backed DevOps. Organizations embracing AIOps and MLOps will be able to drive high release velocity, minimize time-to-market, reduce errors in the process, identify and mitigate risks early in the development cycle and accelerate DevOps with self-healing.
Ajay Kaul
Managing Partner, AgreeYa Solutions(link is external)

AI will continue to make work easier for development teams and potentially eliminate lower level tasks much the way that finance automation has swept across industries and freed those teams from lower-level tasks. What will organizations do with time and the insights remains to be seen.
Hope Lynch
Senior Director, Platform, CloudBees(link is external)

DevOps is all about driving rapid innovations and changes through a repeatable cycle of analyzing, building, testing, and deploying — however, most organizations have an incomplete DevOps adoption, or are stuck in the middle, failing to scale up from the early promise of their initial DevOps initiative. According to Puppet's State of DevOps 2021 report, 58% of companies cite that multiple handoffs between teams are required before product deployments. Organizations with fragmented DevOps processes fail to gain the potential benefits of employing DevOps principles at scale. In 2022, more companies will enable breakthroughs in DevOps by enabling more streamlined work practices with the help of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and automation technologies. By integrating advanced, AI-enabled service and operations management with leading agile development solutions (including tools and solutions developers choose themselves), aligned to new team topologies and streamlined work methods, enterprises will reduce downtime, resolve issues more quickly, and enable the faster flow of change and innovation.
Ali Siddiqui
Chief Product Officer, BMC Software(link is external)

The rise of AI implementation in software development: Over the years, AI has gone from buzzword to a game-changer technology, and it is revolutionizing how developers work. From productivity to quality and speed increase, the benefits are unmeasurable; however, the developer community continues to face a challenge: the implementation of AI. And, with the AI market expected to blow past $500 billion by 2024, next year is bound to be the steppingstone toward an AI-centric software market. For one thing, AI will alter how code is written, updated, and released — DevOps will become increasingly automated and responsive. Software developers will need to learn how AI will fit within their own tasks — with AI-empowered to make changes to itself, the focus for developers will shift to a more creative, strategic level. For example, developers will need to learn how to "talk AI" to provide insights and drive core business operations; integrate different APIs using AI to build a better product and provide faster go-to-market time frames. And lastly, they will have to focus on the aspects of the software that are not so easily automated, such as finding ways that multiple software systems could work together. Developers will likely shift away from the practice and process of development and into building highly customized solutions for a wide range of challenges.
Jonathan Grandperrin
CEO, Mindee(link is external)

Analytics and Data-Driven decision making will be a growing focal point for teams. As DevOps teams look for improvement, they will turn more to empirical analytics driven from operational metrics about people, process, and technology.
Heath Newburn
Senior Product Sales Specialist, PagerDuty(link is external)

App builders are part of the next wave of digital transformation where everyone can become a developer. As app builder software becomes more sophisticated, we expect artificial intelligence to play a greater role in the push toward making work more efficient and productive for developers.
Jason Beres
SVP Developer Tools, Infragistics(link is external)

NO OPS

NoOps is on the rise. Despite the improvements and continued market demand for container orchestration frameworks like Kubernetes, the learning curve is not getting any easier. The steep learning curve, paired with the continued IT skills shortage, accelerates the need for simpler, more automated solutions. Eventually, operations workflows will become fully automated with minimal need for manual intervention.
Venkat Thiruvengadam
Founder and CEO, DuploCloud(link is external)

DevOps will become the practice of providing developers with a "NoOps" experience. Contrary to popular belief, DevOps is no longer about "bringing Dev and Ops together" — it is automating deployment processes. 2022 will see DevOps become even more "Ops" so Developers can focus on what they do best: creating code.
Tobias Kunze
CEO and Co-Founder, Glasnostic(link is external)

DEVOPS IS DEAD

DevOps is Dead — Long Live DevOps: Conversations around "pure" DevOps will continue to ebb and it will become another way of working without a label. With increases in remote working, the principles of DevOps are core to how teams work and will be an expectation. More teams will simply be teams — not DevOps teams.
Hope Lynch
Senior Director, Platform, CloudBees(link is external)

Go to: 2022 DevOps Predictions - Part 2, covering BizDevOps and more.