Top 8 DevOps Trends for 2021

DevOps is about continuous improvement, and many trends are evolving this year and becoming pervasive. In a field as fast-moving as DevOps, it’s important to find out what might lie ahead. 

DevOps (a combination of “Development” and “Operations”) is an ethos that highlights the significance of communication and collaboration between software developers and IT professionals while automating the deployment of software and infrastructure changes.

The aim is to develop a working environment in which building, testing, and deploying software can happen quickly, surely, and frequently. By doing this, an organization can achieve its goals faster and deploy new characteristics, security patches, and bug fixes. 

TestUnity turned to the experts to know their opinions on the top DevOps trends worth watching in 2021:

1. Maturation of Infrastructure Automation (IA) Tools

Infrastructure automation tools allow teams to design and automate delivery services both in on-premise and cloud setups. In 2021, DevOps teams will utilize IA to automate delivery, configuration, and management of IT infrastructure at range and with more reliability.

IA tools offer many advantages to DevOps teams:

• Multi and hybrid cloud infrastructure orchestration.
• Help for immutable and programmable infrastructure.
• Self-service, on-demand environment production.
• Effective resource provisioning.
• Ease of experimentation.

We will see more integrations of IA tools with different pipeline segments in the future. Teams will enjoy more agility by employing CI/CD concepts in IT infrastructures.

2. The Usage of Application Release Orchestration (ARO) Tools

ARO tools link pipeline and environment management with release orchestration. These tools provide the following advantages :

• More agility: The team gives new applications, changes, and defect fixes more quickly and reliably.
• Better productivity: Less manual tasks enables the staff to focus on high-value jobs.
• Higher visibility: Bottlenecks and wait-states become apparent through provisioning.

ARO tools will further enhance the quality and velocity of releases. Organizations will scale release activities across multiple teams, processes, DevOps pipelines, methods, and tools.

3. More Complex Toolchains

A DevOps toolchain is a collection of tools that support pipeline activity. A well-designed toolchain allows team members to:

• Operate together with common objectives.
• Specifically measure metrics.
• Have fast feedback on all code modifications.

DevOps toolchains are becoming more complicated and broader. CI tooling is evolving with new systems that make it simple to build and maintain a build script. Pipelines are gaining new security characteristics. Tools supporting package management and containers are also growing rapidly.

Companies have to ensure optimal toolchain usage by avoiding overlaps, fights, and functionality gaps.

4. The Rise of DevSecOps

Cloud-native security will become more important as companies embrace Kubernetes, serverless, and other cloud-based technologies. Teams require new tools and processes to protect assets, which is why we predict a broad adoption of DevSecOps in the coming year.

DevSecOps is the combination of security and compliance testing into development pipelines. DevSecOps should:

• Seamlessly integrate into the life cycle.
• Give transparent results to appropriate stakeholders.
• Not decrease the agility of developers.
• No need for teams to leave their development environment.
• Implement security protection at runtime.

DevSecOps is becoming more programmable, so expect to see greater levels of automation in the following year.

5. Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Software

APM plays a significant role in providing rapid feedback to developers during deployments. APM software incorporates:

• Front-end monitoring (examines the performance and behavior of user interactions).
• Application discovery, following, and diagnostics (ADTD examines the relations between web and application servers, microservices, and infrastructure).
• AIOps-powered analytics (identifies patterns, anomalies, and causality over the life cycle).

In 2021, APM will be important to shortening MTTR (Mean Time to Repair), preserving service availability, and enhancing user experience. Advanced APM capabilities will assist DevOps teams:

• Better know business processes.
• Give insights into business operations.
• Help with problem separation and prioritization.

6. A Broader Reach of Cloud Management Platforms (CMPs)

Cloud management platforms (CMPs) help teams maintain public, private, and multi-cloud services and resources. CMP functionalities can be a consequence of a single product or a collection of vendor offerings.

In 2021, companies will start to use CMPs to reduce operational costs and assure adequate service levels. CMPs will grant various functionalities to businesses:

• Provisioning and orchestration.
• Service request management.
• Inventory and classification.
• Cloud monitoring and analytics.
• Resource optimization.
• Cloud migration, backup, and disaster restoration.
• Enforcing policy and compliance requirements.

The ability of a CMP to help both developer and I&O (Infrastructure and Operations) staff will be required in 2021. A CMP must:

• Link into the development method without hurting agility.
• Grant I&O teams to enforce provisioning standards easily.

7. More Uncertain Goals and Requirements

Bimodal IT operations allow I&O teams to support users by examining the certainty of their requirements. Bimodal IT relies on two work style forms:

Mode 1: The team identifies the requirements and expects them to lead to predictable IT services or products.

Mode 2: Requirements are unpredictable and demand exploration is in progress. Results are difficult to predict.

There will be an improvement in business opportunities that embrace Mode 2. These strategies include high levels of uncertainly, both in business and IT terms. Organizations will prioritize agility and mean time to assess for project and product teams to pursue new strategies and enhance user experience.

8. Further Growth of AgileOps

AgileOps is a collection of proven agile and DevOps methods that I&O uses to improve agility. AgileOps techniques assist streamline both software development and jobs in other business fields:

• To support development, I&O team members should read DevOps and agile practices.
• For use cases not including development, team members should understand the concepts of Kanban, Gemba Kaizen, and extensive automation.
• Learning scrum, lean methods, and continuous improvement will help I&O improve product management methods.

Conclusion 

Successful DevOps needs teams to self-organize and adjust their methods to specific product needs. DevOps teams will begin to evolve standardized methods and frameworks into customized forms of working.

Businesses that adopt these DevOps trends will improve their capacity to design, build, deploy, and maintain quality software. Adopting these trends on time will also allow companies to stay competitive in another intense year for DevOps.

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