Top DevOps trends for 2022 – and how they apply to you

Abstract

The pandemic put the boosters under digital transformation for most companies, whether they had already embarked on the digitalization journey or not. As soon as lockdowns began, it became apparent that the key to businesses’ survival was supporting a remote workforce to serve customers who couldn’t interact in the usual ways.

Yet while the importance of being digital and the need to invest in digital capabilities have never been more evident, most companies are still not where they want and need to be, digitally speaking. According to a Gartner report that pre-dates the COVID-19 outbreak, over 75% of businesses thought their DevOps activities were progressing too slowly, which means digital transformation efforts are also lagging because the two are interdependent.

In 2022 and beyond, making rapid changes to a business is synonymous with being able to make changes to software quickly. Yet changes to software often result in incompatibilities and other issues, making it harder to carry out further changes while keeping teams aligned around standard designs and architectures.

This alignment and consistency in hybrid integration are foundational to speed and replicable integrations and deployments, avoiding high degrees of customization, which requires manual effort and is often troublesome in the future, requiring retro-engineering. By hybrid integration, we mean the ability to connect applications, data, files, and business partners across cloud and on-premises systems –across personas, domains, endpoints, and deployment models.

This white paper looks at the top eight trends in DevOps for 2022 and how they can improve the use of DevOps to achieve business and operational goals:

1. The benefits of no-code DevOps orchestration
2. Shifting left makes a lot of things go right
3. Managing the metadata
4. The rise – or maybe ‘fall’ – of DevSecOps
5. Better service through serverless computing
6. Microservices will grow, but the brakes are still on
7. Kubernetes – development versus ops
8. AI will be a driver of DevOps

It then addresses how companies can leverage these trends to best effect their organizations.

Introduction

The Gartner report that pre-dates the COVID-19 outbreak found over 75% of businesses thought their DevOps activities were progressing too slowly, which means digital transformation efforts are also lagging because the two are interdependent. Businesses’ rapid responses to changes are enabled by fast changes to software – which is largely why DevOps practices have been ever more widely adopted.

Yet DevOps is not reaching its full potential, as the report indicates, listing the top five issues responsible:

• Initiatives tend to kick off without an organization nailing down what business outcomes it wants to achieve;
• The necessary organizational changes are not properly managed – and tools don’t fix cultural issues;
• Lack of collaboration with ALL stakeholders so that activities are limited to infrastructure and operations teams;
• Attempting to do too much too fast – start small, build on success, outruns big bang approaches; and
• A disconnect between what can realistically be achieved and ill-informed expectations.

It is easy to see how events could have exacerbated all these factors since early 2020. Adjusting to remote working and new ways of serving customers were huge challenges in themselves without bringing about additional cultural change to accommodate new technologies and associated practices at the same time.

In addition, there is a big shortage of people with the right skills. While it’s true that tools for developers and to help with the adoption of the cloud are becoming more widely used, the number of tools is also proliferating and adding to the complexity.

All of which is why the trends outlined in the next section are likely to be the top ones in 2022 and beyond.

Section 1

DevOps is accepted as an indispensable software development methodology that can bring benefits such as faster delivery, better quality, and higher customer satisfaction. No wonder that according to this survey, 83% of respondents implemented DevOps practices in 2021.

Further, the report revealed that highly evolved firms are more likely to have implemented extensive automation, and 90% of respondents with highly developed DevOps practices reported that their teams had automated most repetitive tasks.

 

Source: Puppet 2021 State of DevOps Report

So whether organizations are seeking to follow suit and follow those leaders with automating the most repetitive jobs or they are ready to move to the next phase of DevOps deployment, these trends are expected to shape DevOps going forward. Automated deployment is a major theme throughout to attain consistency, robustness, and speed for hybrid integration.

Software delivery is complicated against the backdrop of rapid digitalization and the adoption of multi-cloud ecosystems. Engineers use a variety of tools for different stages of software’s development lifecycle:

It can be expensive and time-consuming for companies to connect and integrate all these tools and build and manage the software pipelines, from ideation to delivery of software. A developers’ time can be eaten up in writing scripts and glue code to deal with the range of tools, making the skills shortage more acute.

No-code DevOps orchestration enables DevOp teams and engineers to instantly provision and integrates their preferred constant integration/constant delivery and deployment (CI/CD) and DevOps tools. Using a common framework, they can also build scalable no-code declaratively, in minutes, suitable for a range of use cases.

Declarative programs describe their desired results without explicitly listing the commands or steps needed to reach that outcome. This means developers spend their time building core products that translate into faster market times instead of struggling with the tools and pipelines.