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DevOps Trends 2021

Fernando Pereiro, Head of Devops and Corporate Platforms

The 7 key concepts that will shape the new DevOps landscape

The supply of products and services on the market and the demand from organisations seeking to benefit from this technological field have been symbiotic, nurturing each other and resulting in ecosystems and work teams that go far beyond mere code integration and software deployment.

The "DevOps philosophy" has therefore become a strategic pillar thanks to automation, collaboration and standardisation of many different technologies such as: Data, Cloud & Infrastructure, QA, Cybersecurity, IoT, Blockchain, etc…

New DevOps Landscape

The year 2021 and the situation we are now experiencing will bring new "DevOps landscapes", and with them, new challenges, in a business scenario that will be marked by the search for optimisation and efficiency. Without having total certainty of what will happen, I can expand on seven ideas or areas that will undoubtedly give us a lot to talk about... and work on!

1. DevSecOps

I know! We have been hearing about the concept of "DevSecOps" for a long time, but during 2021 and I foresee many years to come... we will continue to hear about it, learn about it and work on it. The growing cyber threat and increasing number of attacks, combined with the maturity of DevOps teams and ecosystems, is enabling the adoption of best practice security across the lifecycle of digital assets, from conception to deployment. But not only that, a mature DevOps framework is capable of managing security policies in a controlled, adapted, reusable and automated way with paradigms such as "security as code" or "compliance as code", so we can have asset management and its associated security policies at a single point.

Standardisation and automation are the main elements to be implemented to comply with security policies, eliminating manual intervention in critical and repetitive tasks.

2. DevOps Self Service

This is a concept that goes hand in hand with the evolution of DevOps teams into platform teams: specialised groups that design, develop, operate and evolve the engine on which the entire lifecycle of an organisation's digital assets takes place - after all, "that's what DevOps teams are becoming”. One of the key points in this concept is how the DevOps team provides the other teams with a portal and self-service mechanisms that allow them to create and modify workspaces in a standardised, automated, autonomous and homogeneous way, further reducing time in the value chain.

The provision of DevOps environments and infrastructure for development teams should not be done through a wall, it should be done freely in a controlled environment. Consider those two options as a comparison between "Castles and Casinos", a comparison that you’ll see again when you read the report that we have prepared in more detail and will publish in the coming days.

3. New DevOps Capacity: DevOps as a Service

The increasing adoption of the DevOps philosophy together with the continuous challenge of attracting talent is leading organisations to increase the training and awareness of their employees in new technological paradigms, and to contract new types of more specialised, outsourced and efficient services.

The point where necessity and technological maturity meet has come, forcing the search for alternative solutions to meet specific, modern needs. On the one hand, internal solutions, identifying new roles within existing teams and promoting more practical and efficient training and, on the other hand, external solutions supported by concepts such as "DevOps as a Service".

4. Auditable DevOps

A lot happens within a DevOps framework: every developer reflects their work, code is converted into artifacts and then into value for customers, asset quality is analysed and determined, security policies are created and modified, etc. All this generates a huge amount of information that can be used and should be recorded for future analysis and audits. Auditing what happens within a DevOps framework provides insight into how an organisation works, operates and collaborates, in fact, it is the best starting point for establishing improvement plans, making strategic decisions with suppliers, teams and departments, and optimising the entire process from idea generation to customer delivery.

Obtaining metrics from a DevOps ecosystem is one of the steps to follow for correct Value Stream Management.

5. Meeting the ITIL world

Years ago PMI gave a nod to Agile and recently ITIL has given a nod to DevOps. This is not ground-breaking news, but cultural and organisational changes take time, and I believe that now is the time when the few remaining barriers between the two worlds will disappear. The Agile and Lean principles that have been leveraged in ITIL, if put into practice, will provide a natural entry point to DevOps within an organisation or to the expansion of the philosophy "no matter where".

This year will undoubtedly be the year of building bridges between two worlds that until recently have been far-removed from one another.
The meeting of DevOps and ITIL will be a major driver in the generation of new capabilities within organisations.

6. Test Environment Management

The correct management of data and testing environments remains a bottleneck for organisations. The maturity of DevOps and the tools in its ecosystem make it possible to create automated flows that deploy a new set of quality, test-specific data, to subsequently discard it and optimise the use of these resources. With a large part of QA requiring the specification and definition of each type of test, and another large part of Data requiring the establishment of the mechanisms for cleansing, anonymising and creating datasets, test environment management is a process that is orchestrated by the technology that drives a DevOps team.

Test Environment Management goes beyond Test Data Management by optimising the management of data and test environments in general.

7. DevOps assembly lines

As a DevOps ecosystem grows in use within an organisation, there are a number of challenges to overcome. It is very common that over time very large and specific pipelines are created for each asset, with problems including little technical standardisation and effort on the part of all the teams involved in the process. This is a situation in which many organisations find themselves and 2021 will be a key year of improvement on this point.

Assembly Lines are not a new concept, but they have become more relevant as the DevOps philosophy has become more mature, as it is about creating Steps that reflect the work done by each team and then creating pipelines that contain those Steps, creating modular and configurable flows for each case; in the purest style of an assembly line in a factory. Assembly Lines are arguably "Pipeline Pipelines" that not only help to standardise, but also promote end-to-end automation and the very planning of the teams involved in the workflow.

Assembly Lines are the technical representation of Value Stream Management, linking the individual steps of the cycle for a granular yet unified management.

Ready to get pole position? Make the most of anticipating what will happen in the future...

In the coming days we will publish the full report "DevOps Trends 2021", if you are passionate about the DevOps world, write to us at this address and you will be among the first to receive it: digitalmarketingspain@ust.com