DevOps is not about tools or commands, in simple terms, DevOps is a culture where all of us are expected to take more responsibilities and help an organization to achieve its business goal. If you see in the market what is happening, the traditional way of working is going away. So, you cannot just be a developer, you cannot just be a QA person, or you cannot just be a support engineer or a database administrator or the system admin. You have to take up some additional responsibilities along with your existing profile. In this article, I will talk about few important DevOps trends you must know.
Speed in Delivery
The very first goal that organizations are looking forward to is how we make sure that whatever work we are doing within an organization has to be rapidly increased. The major goal what they have is how do we deliver a service or a product or a release to a customer as soon as possible. So continuous delivery is being one of the primary goals that every organization is focusing on. A developer has to focus on continuous development, a QA has to focus on continuous testing, a person who is doing operations has to ensure that he monitors the applications or services continuously, and if you are more into support, how do you ensure that there is a continuous Support. Hence, there is a continuous word being added to every work that we are doing.
All of us have to understand that the goal for an organization has been moving towards continuous delivery, so being a developer, how quickly can you ensure you can write code, being a QA person, how quickly can you ensure that you can test, be a support engineer, how do you make sure that your applications are quickly back to normal in case of any issues or if you are an administrator how quickly can you ensure that you are providing an infrastructure which various people can use.
Increase in the Adoption of DevSecOps Solutions
DevSecOps is security as a code practice where the DevOps lifecycle gets integrated with security tools. From the beginning of the DevOps lifecycle, security steps start in DevSecOps, i.e., from the development stage where a developer writes the code for the application. To build secure applications without any vulnerabilities, it is good to add security steps to the DevOps process. This transformational shift incorporates practices, cultures, and tools in every phase of DevOps.
A/c to the DevSecOps model, below are the practices that must be implemented :
- You must create threat models in collaboration with development and security teams
- You should prioritize all the requirements related to security in the product backlog
- Add security tools like Contrast Security, Checkmarx in the development integration pipeline
- Create automated tests evaluated by security experts
- Review security policies related to infrastructure before deployment
Everything as a code
Everything as a code (EaC) refers to the principle of managing all aspects of application development, delivery, and management by defining and code the complete infrastructure, schema and pipelines used to create, maintain, iterate or expand app development. EaC enables a highly scalable and repeatable approach to tedious and manual tasks like provisioning infrastructure or managing application deployments.
The everything as code approach also offers the benefit of reducing the risk of human error. Because all of your workflows in EaC is defined as code, so you no longer have to worry about an engineer forgetting to do some task or clicking the wrong button by mistake. Auditing also is very easy with EaC because you can use your EaC configurations to determine what was done to your systems.
AIOps
AIOps is a new term in the industry, which stands for Artificial Intelligence in IT Operations. It refers to the use of AI and data science to analyze big data using various business and IT operations tools. The goals of AIOps are to improve the efficiency of IT services, increase the speed of delivery of the various services, and to provide a superior user experience.
AIOps enables us to move away from siloed operations and helps in providing intelligent insights that can be communicated to the stakeholders. You can also apply AIOps to drive automation and collaboration within an organization. If you are a big organization such as Google, Facebook, Amazon with big IT infrastructure on cloud servers, AIOps can really be useful. You can use AIOps to reduce your company’s cloud costs and improve cloud security compliance through AI automation.
GitOps
GitOps was introduced by Weaveworks in 2017. It is a process that has a set of practices to empower developers to perform those tasks that fall under the umbrella of IT operations. As a developer you can use GitOps to achieve continuous deployment of cloud-native applications. The processes of GitOps are very developer-centric, and Git, a widely used version control DevOps tool, is the single source of truth. Git captures each configuration of the environment’s infrastructure and the change in application code. We can call GitOps an operational framework that follows all the DevOps best practices for application deployment. And these best practices include version control, CI/CD, collaboration, compliance, and automation. Below are the benefits of using GitOps:
- It provides a better developer experience as they can easily use a familiar tool like Git to manage Kubernetes clusters without knowing the internal details.
- Using the CI/CD pipeline in GitOps model with feedback control loop, you can immediately deploy every change in the code on the production cluster, which makes the deployment faster.
- GitOps has a consistent workflow that provides a single model for applications, infrastructure, and Kubernetes add-on changes.
- Using git functionalities, you can roll back to a stable release if the system goes down because of a faulty release.
- With GitOps, you can manage the permissions of the developers easily.
- Self-documenting environments that records the complete history of every change on the system and deployments on the environments.
Final Thoughts
DevOps is one of the trending solutions for all IT organizations to increase quality, enable agility, and reduce time to market. But DevOps needs to upgrade and integrate modern tools and techniques from time to time to bring greater impact in the changing market needs. Looking at the DevOps trends in this article, it would not be wrong to say that in an all-digital world the future of DevOps lies in designing hybrid architecture, AI and ML integration, becoming cloud-centric, self-service capabilities, edge prioritizing, etc.
So, more and more organizations will adopt DevOps in the coming days, it is for sure here to stay. We will see multiple businesses embracing the DevOps methodology, which will help them scale their businesses and enhance their digital transformation efforts.
