I have learnt in one of my MBA classes at Indian School of Business (ISB) that the evolution of technology follows a series of “S” curves, as depicted in the below screenshot on LHS. There could hardly be any better space than DevOps to see it in reality. DevOps is such a fast moving and ever-evolving landscape that the “Innovation Window” doesn’t make any discrete appearance (as shown in the below screenshot on RHS), even though it is running parallelly behind the scene.
(Source: www.ideagenius.com )
At Innominds, we strive to stay ahead of the curve so that we can serve the ever-increasing need of the industry. Be it helping customers with their assessment of DevOps maturity to migrating heavy-duty on premises infrastructure to multiple clouds to setting up the whole build and release processes, Innominds possesses deep expertise across the complete DevOps lifecycle.
Being a thought leader in the DevOps industry, we believe the following market trends will rule the roost in year 2020:
1. Adoption to Multi-Cloud Approach
Innovation window getting shorter and shorter is the perfect example to illustrate the above-mentioned point. Such is the pace of innovation that not a long time ago, we were talking about ‘adoption’ to cloud and now we are talking about adoption to ‘not just one but multiple clouds’. The demand from customers and the supply from providers are almost in equilibrium, resulting in tremendous evolution.
- From supply side, all major public cloud providers, we call them Big 3 (AWS, Azure and GCP), are innovating at a rapid speed and bringing industry-specific capabilities
- From demand side, customers are becoming more and more educated to select the best of all worlds
Other reasons for this trend becoming trendy are customers trying to reduce the dependency on single cloud provider, eliminate legal challenges, reduce the cost, and leverage industry specific cloud capabilities.
2. Assembly Line for DevOps
Whenever someone hear Assembly Line (AL), the first thing that people visualize is similar to the below picture. DevOps industry may have borrowed this term from manufacturing industry, but the concept is still the same. We have moved significantly away from performing DevOps activities manually to automate almost every piece of work and various tools have come up in the market to support automation. However, the whole DevOps toolchain is still highly fragmented. For example, Infra Provisioning, Configuration Management, Test Automation & Security Patching are still achieved in silos, or at best, integrated with a lot of manual efforts. This is where AL comes into play, i.e. glue all these automated activities together to achieve Continuous Delivery. DevOps industry, as it is getting matured, is moving away from being merely a “pipeline” to “pipeline of pipelines.”
3. Containerization and Kubernetes
We believe these two terms have the most mindshare among the whole DevOps community. Developers have taken the containerization world by storm and Kubernetes is becoming the de facto standard for containers orchestration. Kubernetes has gained so much popularity that the industry is now moving away from a thought “Can I use Kubernetes for this?” to “Can we build this for Kubernetes?”
In almost every discussion with our customers, containers and their orchestration pop up. We believe this trend knows only one direction in 2020 i.e. ‘upwards.’
4. Security in DevOps – DevSecOps or SecDevOps or DevOpsSec or SecDevSecOpsSec or something else?
Gone are the days when security used to be considered as last phase in software development lifecycle. With the adoption of agile methodology and departure from single tenant to multi-tenant applications, security cannot be imagined to be injected at the end but rather it has become integral part at every stage of the end-to-end process flow.
(Source: www.gartner.com)
DevSecOps is such a thought-after coined terminology that it sits right in between “Dev” and “Ops” but make no mistake - it doesn’t signify any sequence rather it is based on the assumption that everyone starting from Development to Operations team are responsible for security.
Funnily enough, industry leaders are vouching for “shifting security left” and call it as SecDevOps, instead. We say - “What’s in the name, this trend is getting a lot of fame.”
5. Serverless Architecture
Does an application architecture without servers should be called serverless? Well, it’s just a metaphor of running applications without worrying about servers; so don’t take the literal meaning here.
Are you utilizing Serverless computing yet? If not, then chances are that you will do so in 2020. Although it has been going through multiple challenges including lack of standardization, stickiness to one single cloud provider, complex application testing, difficult monitoring, and lack of trust in shifting server-level security to cloud providers, the industry is getting more and more matured and fast realizing that these challenges are not insurmountable, resulting into each of these challenges getting addressed faster.
The benefits of ‘serverless’ are catching everyone’s attention and the most important benefits being – it eliminates the need for server management like you only pay for what you use and not like traditional servers running with 30-40% resources unutilized, and being limited in scalability.
Given the benefits and maturity obtained in 2019, we strongly believe this trend will rock the world in 2020.
6. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in DevOps – AIOps
AI and ML can revolutionize the whole DevOps industry in 2020, if people with creative mindset come to the fore. AI/ML holds the potential to transform everything we do in DevOps including monitoring applications and infrastructure, deployment strategies for applications to dev, test, and prod environment, and setting up CI/CD pipelines, etc.
(Source: https://www.transperfect.com )
In fact, AI and ML can be considered as the natural extension for DevOps, for e.g., when we do functional, regression, or user-acceptance testing, tons of data is generated that can be utilized to generate plethora of advantages including predictive and prescriptive analytics on top of it. It can be leveraged to identify the coding practices that are causing errors, thereby improving the efficiency in the whole process, and to forecast the failures by reading the patterns. Another example for using AI/ML is in augmenting DevSecOps by detecting & alerting threats including DDoS attacks much faster than traditional DevSecOps processes.
Although the adoption curve of AI and ML is arguably low, we see DevOps is a ripe industry for AI and ML infusion for 2020.
7. Adoption of 6 Cs of DevOps
If you are a matured DevOps company or have some level of adoption for DevOps culture, the chances are that you have implemented, partially or completely, 6 Cs of DevOps. It has become a trending topic to assess which of these 6 components are missing in your DevOps organization and even if all of these 6 Cs are implemented, the level of maturity in these processes varies from customers to customers.
As the time to market the products and the time to update/patch them is getting shorter and shorter, these 6Cs, if not implemented correctly, bring a lot of inefficiencies and challenges. Since there is a huge scope to improve, not only for all of these 6 Cs independently, but also ways to make sure these 6 Cs works in tandem, we see 2020 as the year that will see a big leap forward in the adoption.
8. DevOps-as-a-Service (DaaS)
Organizations, especially software development or product based companies around the world, are trying to outstrip the competition by accelerating time to market their products, responding swiftly to ever-changing market needs, integrating security from the beginning, and decreasing the overall cost across the chain. All of these couldn’t be possible without adopting the DevOps culture or practice, which is inherently designed to break the barriers and increase the collaboration between development, operations, and other teams.
With a continuous evolution of technology and tools in every phase of DevOps lifecycle, organizations are finding it difficult to stay updated and this is where “DevOps-as-a-Service” has come to their rescue. If you are looking for a proven thought leader to help assess your IT environment and draw a long-term roadmap for DevOps adoption, DevOps-as-a-Service is a solution for you.
Enterprises are increasingly depending on service providers such as Innominds, which has pioneered DevOps-as-a-Service and is already supporting leading Enterprises and ISVs around the world.
With all this DevOps latest trends ready to rock, Innominds is equipped with the skills and industry knowledge and built various business models and offerings around each of the above trends. Watch out for this space with the further updates and offerings around each subject. Nonetheless, if you are exploring any of these Industry trends for your business in 2020 or if would like to learn how Innominds can help in leveraging these trends best for your business, please reach out to our support teams having presence across US, Europe, and India.
About Innominds
Innominds is a leading Digital Transformation and Product Engineering company headquartered in San Jose, CA. It offers co-creation services to enterprises for building solutions utilising digital technologies focused on Devices, Apps, and Analytics. Innominds builds better outcomes securely for its clients through reliable advanced technologies like IoT, Blockchain, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, DevOps and Enterprise Mobility among others. From idea to commercialisation, we strive to build convergent solutions that help our clients grow their business and realise their market vision.
To know more about our offerings, please write to marketing@innominds.com
