DevOps Trends For 2020: A Complete Guide

Originally published on 'HackerNoon'

Introduction to DevOps

While firms have different meanings of DevOps, we can define DevOps as a mindset that a team adopts to gear its engineering momentum to newer heights. DevOps is mostly about eliminating the barriers in engineering and mainly the cultural obstacles that come in between the idea and execution, making the process of shipping software better, faster, cheaper and more secure.

Whatever you may call it, it should all come down to automation at the end of the day, which in turn should help firms with developing fast, shipping fast, fail fast, recovering fast, and learning fast. 

From the SDLC model to today, things have changed tremendously. in 2009, DevOps was coined, and it advocated a cultural transformation and some tech principles where everything was treated as code. Then came over the principles like CI/CD, but still, the software used to be written as a big monolith & this had numerous challenges.

So in 2011, microservices architecture was introduced, this microservices architecture advocated the fine-grained and loosely coupled components with a specific task to be carried. 

The applications written following this loosely coupled microservices-based architecture were termed, cloud-native. The firms are transitioning from VMs to Kubernetes to Serverless, depending on their business needs and goals. 

According to a slide from Black Hat USA 2019 by Kelly Shortridge & Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Four factors are important while benchmarking yourself with the elite performers in the DevOps industry. 

1. Lead time for change 
2. Release frequency 
3. Time to recovery 
4. Change failure rate 

In this article, we will see what the future holds for DevOps.

1. Cloud-Native will become a must:

The Diamanti survey of more than 500 IT leaders implies container technology, by all means, has grown far beyond and has matured dramatically in one year and moved from developer experimentation to production. Cloud-Native technologies will rise to new elevations, especially Kubernetes adoption. Cloud-Native technologies give a higher advantage for the firms in faster time to market 

2. There will be a rise in the container registry services:

This point should have been included in the cloud-native part itself. Still, I think this needs special attention as most of the software companies now are indulging themselves with the container registries that help developers store and manage artifacts and all dependencies for the smooth flow of software development life cycle. 

Just like managing application source code in a version-controlled repository such as GIT, managing Docker images is very crucial. Docker also provides similar capabilities of managing Docker images that can be managed locally on your development machine and even on a remote container registry, also known as Docker hub.

But, sometimes, these images are prone to many security-related issues and can be easily accessible by hackers. Hence, modern firms need a safe and secure way of managing and maintaining their container images through registries, container registries.

3. Golang and DevOps will thrive together:

Golang as a programming language will create more impact on the DevOps community, it is already making an impact. Most of the DevOps tools like Kubernetes, helm, Docker, etcd, Istio, etc are written in Go. Joe Beda, the creator of Kubernetes, writes about why Kubernetes is written in Go.

Golang is excellent for working in environments where you can’t or don’t want to install dependencies since it compiles into a stand-alone binary. Without having to get the whole environment set up, you can get things done in a much faster way than other programming languages.

4. Security will become an even high-priority factor (DevSecOps):

Security gets more priority in the development life cycle than ever. Security becomes everybody’s responsibility rather than just the security experts. 

5. Open-Source will grow beyond boundaries:

Open-source gets more and more attention since the advantages & flexibility that it brings to the developers. Open source is on the move, a recent survey by Synopsys found that almost 70% of corporate organizations are either contributing to or have open-source projects.

6. Serverless is still new but has a bright future:

Deploying in milliseconds is the future & many firms are making use of serverless architecture to the fullest extent already. The Serverless market is expected to reach $7.7B by 2021. According to RightScale's 2018 State of the Cloud report, Serverless is the fastest-growing cloud service model today, the annual growth rate is 75% and is expected to go beyond expectations in 2020.

The other two important trends you can read in the original article (in the link below)

What Future Holds for DevOps in 2020: A Complete Guide