Top 10 DevOps Trends For 2022 And Beyond. IT-Devoted Public Cannot Omit!

Given DevOps empowers organizations to act smarter, collaborate faster, and deliver better results, it's no surprise that DevOps has become a top priority for the tech industry. DevOps has altered the cultural paradigm and made the positive influence of engineers on business decisions much more noticeable. By choosing peer-recommended platforms like ProfiSea Labs for solving complex DevOps problems, organizations can jump-start their clients' growth potential. Several astonishing things are happening in DevOps, for example, according to Gartner, more than 85% of organizations will use a cloud computing strategy by 2025, and 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud platforms (up from 30% in 2021). Plus, apps will be moving from full-blown development to “application assembly and integration" mode – these and other major trends will make a difference in 2022, so watch out for this information.

Follower or Leader? Main reasons to keep an eye on trends

Some businesses create trends, some companies are following them, and some organizations are not either creating or following trends. Unfortunately, the latter has very few chances to succeed. However, an interesting fact is that a business cannot create hot trends alone. To become market leaders they must clearly get their customers’ needs and skillfully mix processes of creating and following trends which is a never-ending cycle. So, here are 5-Bs hot reasons why you must follow trends:

• Better planning. Trends tell you about the future events and changes you should consider when planning the next steps.
• Better forecasting. If you understand trends, the prediction will be better and easier for you.
• Better ideas popping. Knowing the trends will help you to have better ideas to improve your product and services.
• Better warnings monitoring. Trends as an extremely reliable source of changes will give you early warnings about what is wrong to deal with the issues immediately.
• Better and easier way from follower to leader. Following trends will make you a leader because only leaders rule the market.

Top trends from Gartner for 2022 and beyond

Gartner recently announced the top strategic technology trends that IT organizations need to explore in 2022 notifying that if CEOs and Boards of Directors strive to drive growth through direct digital connections with customers, their first concerns must reflect the same business essentials found in each of Gartner's core strategic technology trends for 2022. So, Gartner's core strategic technology trends for 2022 include:

• Data Fabric. By 2024, data fabric deployments will quadruple efficiency in data utilization while cutting human-driven data management tasks in half.
• Cybersecurity Mesh. By 2024, organizations adopting a cybersecurity mesh architecture to integrate security tools to work as a cooperative ecosystem will reduce the financial impact of individual security incidents by an average of 90%.
• Privacy-enhancing computation. By 2025, 60% of large organizations will use one or more privacy-enhancing computation techniques in analytics, business intelligence, or cloud computing.
• Cloud-Native Platforms. By 2025, cloud-native platforms will serve as the foundation for more than 95% of new digital initiatives — up from less than 40% in 2021.
• Composable Applications. By 2024, the design mantra for new SaaS and custom applications will be composable API-first or API-only, rendering traditional SaaS and custom applications as a legacy.

• Decision Intelligence. By 2023, more than a third of large organizations will have analysts practicing decision intelligence, including decision modeling.
• Hyperautomation. By 2024, diffuse hyperautomation spending will drive up the total cost of ownership 40-fold, making adaptive governance a differentiating factor in corporate performance.
• AI Engineering. By 2025, the 10% of enterprises that establish AI engineering best practices will generate at least three times more value from their AI efforts than the 90% of enterprises that do not.
• Distributed Enterprise. By 2023, 75% of organizations that exploit distributed enterprise benefits will realize revenue growth 25% faster than competitors.
• Total Experience. By 2026, 60% of large enterprises will use the total experience to transform their business models to achieve world-class customer and employee advocacy levels.
• Autonomic Systems. By 2024, 20% of organizations selling autonomic systems or devices will require customers to waive indemnity provisions related to the learned behavior of their products.
• Generative AI. By 2025, generative AI will account for 10% of all data produced, up from less than 1% today.

Top 10 DevOps Trends For 2022 And Beyond

DevOps is more philosophy than a technology that covers the entire SDLC, from design to production. DevOps focuses on finding solutions and quickly implementing them, which typically includes close cooperation of both operations and development teams. This approach has been proven to help organizations respond more quickly to changing market and customer requirements and adapt more quickly to advances in technology. DevOps is a sought-after topic in the IT world, and it's only getting hotter. An IDC study predicted the DevOps market will reach $ 8 billion by 2022. DevOps will affect how organizations operate, especially when it comes to agility. It has changed the way organizations do business, making them more agile and faster than ever before. The growth in DevOps is in part due to the growing number of organizations using public cloud solutions. Nearly half (47%) of enterprise workloads and data are in a public cloud intending to increase workloads and data in the public cloud over the next 12 months by 8%. And nearly two-thirds (69%) of SMB workloads will be in the cloud with 67% of data will be residing in a public cloud within the next 12 months. Wider adoption of DevOps across IT and other industries will drive many DevOps trends in 2022, appropriately. So, 2022 DevOps trends are:

1. Automation

   According to this 2021 State of DevOps report, highly evolved companies have implemented extensive automation modes in their processes. Plus, the report revealed that 90% of respondents who implemented best DevOps practices had automated previously manual cycles at most. To implement infrastructure automation correctly, you must:

   • Be comfortable writing automation code
   • Adopt a source control system such as GitHub to stash the code in
   • Upskill system admins or IT operators to coders
   • Or, instead of all previously mentioned, simply use a professional cloud management platform capable to automate your cloud infrastructure processes at most.

2. MLOps and ALOps

   With organizations constantly collecting/creating data, they need to be smart about organizing and analyzing this overwhelming amount of it. Old-school data science solutions fail to keep up with the amount of data generated, which is where machine learning and artificial intelligence come in. MLOps/AIOps brings CI/CD and infrastructure auto-provisioning to machine learning and other AI model learning algorithms. These new techniques provide visibility into huge pools of data, which automatically provides insight into problems, their root causes, and solutions to fix them. It’s especially appealing in the DevOps arena because both AIOps and MLOps-wrapped platforms provide the transparency and automation needed to speed up processes and reduce inefficiencies.

3. FinOps

   FinOps, as a cultural shift like DevOps, is challenging organizations to better manage their development costs and implement the right solutions across the organization. By building a cross-functional team that closely monitors spending and utilizing innovative cloud governing platforms, organizations increase the visibility of their costs and metrics so that they can make smarter decisions. This enables organizations to apply best practices in cost optimization, whether it is capacity planning, sizing correctly, or negotiating mandatory use discounts. This contributes to the measurement of not only costs but also the use of resources, which makes the organization more efficient and flexible in what they do, after all.

4. Chaos Engineering

   Have you ever woken up at 3 a.m. when an app crashed because it couldn't handle a connection or load? Chaos Engineering's idea is to prevent this situation by detecting security holes/vulnerabilities and helping predict when a system crash might occur. The whole idea of Chaos Engineering is that you need the ability to deliberately hack a system so that you can figure out why and how you broke it, which ultimately makes the system so much better. One of the best and funniest tools you can take a look at is Netflix's Chaos Monkey, the Chaos Engineering product. Please do not use it on your production system until you fully test it.

   More Caos Engineering solutions such as Chaos Gorilla, Chaos Kong, Security Monkey, Gremlin, Chaos Toolkit, Chaos Mesh, ChaosIQ, Kube-monkey, Chaoskube, Litmus Chaos are here to your attention, plus, AWS Fault Injection Simulator, a managed service for experimenting with error injection in AWS that makes it easy to improve application operation, visibility, and elasticity.

5. Value Stream Management

   DevOps data and value stream management together can help your organization add value to your customers and deliver amazing business results. VSM is a technique that optimizes the steps required to present, implement, and deliver software to the user. The ultimate goals are to improve quality, speed up delivery, and increase revenue. To implement the correct VSM process, you must:

   • Learn that ‘more’ does not mean ‘more’. You should always think about quality, not quantity. If an engineer creates 10 pipelines, that's fine, but do all of them go through? It is much better to have 5 lines passing through instead of 7/10 of them failing.
   • Choose the VSM platform you are comfortable with. With lots of vendors in the VSM field presented, some perform VSM and link it with DevOps better than others. For example, some VSM vendors will put more emphasis on development and management collaboration, while others will put more emphasis on efficiency.
   • Make sure it is not a micromanagement implementation. With some VSM vendors, you can see which engineers are working on which branch and what they are contributing to. This can lead to very fast "micromanagement" and is contrary to the purpose of the VSM.

6. Kubernetes Operations framework

   Containers are now widely used. According to Flexera’s 2021 State of cloud report, 53% of organizations use Docker, and 21% plan to use it. 48% use Kubernetes, a Docker-based container orchestration solution, and another 25% plan to use it. Many organizations also opt for a container as a service offering from public cloud providers. The AWS Container Service (ECS/EKS) is widespread, with 51% using it and another 23% intending to use it. The Kubernetes Operator platform provides Kubernetes with custom resources that can manage applications and their components. The goal is for IT operation specialists to work like users when managing application services. Operation engineers complete lots of repetitive tasks that take much time and energy, such as deploying an application, creating and restoring backups of application states, and simulating the failure of all or part of the cluster to verify its resilience. The operation-centered framework is designed to automate these repetitive tasks so engineers can focus on more important work.

7. Serverless infrastructure

   The serverless architecture marketplace with new DevOps frontiers is rapidly evolving to meet new standards and drive down infrastructure costs. The use of a serverless architecture ensures that developers can avoid maintenance issues. However, there is a constant shift in next-generation microservices. The DevOps movement is changing the traditional data center model to the one that enables deeper collaboration between development teams and IT operations teams, giving developers more control. The adoption of DevOps practices led to the creation of a new type of data center: the serverless data center that is characterized by self-service, code infrastructure, Dev/Test/Prod-focus, and automated workflows. DevOps is the impulse that makes Serverless Computing possible to deploy applications faster and more efficiently than ever before, without worrying about running out of resources.

8. DevSecOps

   We cannot avoid the security topic here, of course. Unfortunately, security is one of those aspects that is almost completely neglected in any organization. Quite frankly, most teams would rather act quickly and tackle security later, rather than implement security right from the beginning. Luckily, times are changing. Kubernetes, serverless infrastructures, and other cloud technologies adoption will surely make cloud security more critical. With that, teams will need to use new solutions and processes to protect the assets turning to DevSecOps.

   DevSecOps is a fusion of security and compliance testing in the development pipeline that must:

   • Inject flawlessly into the SDLC
   • Provide clear outcomes for stakeholders
   • Upgrade developers agility
   • Help teams focus on the development environment
   • Grant runtime protection

9. Extended Berkeley Packet Filter for Kubernetes

   Not new (released in 1992) but still quite inspiring for DevOps experts, Extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) is a Linux kernel feature that enables faster and easier networking, categorizing, and security establishing for Kubernetes-based container environment. With eBPF, each node in the cluster and its behavior are easily custom-tailored rather than killed or rebuilt. This can be extremely helpful when correctly implemented, allowing high-speed and secure traffic sharing, policies generation, and monitoring. Today, cloud experts are highly curious about the benefits of eBPF-based cloud tools and how to debug performance issues with the help of eBPF tracing.

10. DevOps as a Service (DaaS), NOC, and SRE

    DevOps as a service (DaaS), Network Operations Center (NOC), and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) services are expected to be popular trends in 2022. It is the concept of providing customers with an automated, scalable, and reliable DevOps platform to simplify software development lifecycle management. With DevOps, NOC, or SRE services provided, developers and maintenance professionals can work together virtually anywhere they have an Internet connection. As DevOps as a service, NOC and SRE may become popular in 2022, companies will be able to outsource their DevOps needs to a third party to reduce workload, cost, and increase productivity. It is promised that DevOps/NOC/SRE as a service will offer various benefits to software companies, and there will be more DaaS/NOC/SRE vendors in the future.

Final thoughts

DevOps delivers a level of speed, efficiency, reliability, and quality in software development never seen before in the industry, and shows how IT leaders without the advice and guidance of technical experts curb inefficiencies in delivering products to the end-user. DevOps has changed the cultural paradigm and made the positive influence of developers on business decisions much more evident. As IT decision-makers select professional DevOps platforms and solutions to tackle complex problems, organizations can lift their income while drastically reducing spendings. If you have any DevOps-akin questions, you are welcome to contact us for a free consultation.