Understanding the role of Autonomous Assurance in DevOps

Catalyst

The introduction of the latest technologies, such as AI and machine learning, can be seen as a way for organizations to accelerate growth, increase efficiency, improve customer experience, etc. However, the truth is that these technologies alone will do little to deliver these business outcomes. Autonomous assurance is one such area, where the application of the technology, if not matched with the organizational maturity readiness, will fail to deliver all the promised benefits. This report looks at how and why autonomous assurance is critical to service delivery. Omdia argues that only by ensuring the technology, people, and processes are aligned can any new technology become transformative and deliver real business value.

Omdia view

The IT industry is going through a significant change and, many would argue, a long overdue transformation. At the heart of this transformation are the new emerging technologies such as AI, machine learning, deep learning, NLP, etc. The degree to which these technologies, when deployed, will deliver the business outcomes is less clear. Omdia considers delivering the required business outcomes are linked to the maturity and culture of the organization and matching these to the use of technology. The IT operational activities (defined as those activities IT undertakes to ensure business users can perform their activities) span multiple different disciplines, yet most organizations still have a very team-centric or domain-centric approach to managing and orchestrating these disciplines.

The rise of DevOps was seen as the vehicle to bring two of these different entities (developers and operations) together for the greater good ? to improve the business outcomes faster. While it is true DevOps has gone someway to changing the culture and mind set of IT operational activities, it remains focused on a too-narrow definition of the role IT has to play in the digital enterprise. Omdia considers that AIOPs represents a natural evolution of DevOps and can become more inclusive of all the activities that impact the customer/employee experience or business outcome. Autonomous assurance is an example of the application of AI/ML technology that transforms the role of IT operations and DevOps teams in the software delivery lifecycle. This is because, it is only when IT can ensure its focus is customer outcome-centric that its activities will be aligned to this objective and the tools used will be used in a way designed to ensure it meets those objectives. Autonomous assurance brings the IT operational activities and the IT development activities more aligned and streamlined. A secondary benefit of autonomous assurance is it strengthens the DevOps team and its processes making the software lifecycle more robust and integrated into service delivery excellence.

Key findings

• Application development is moving to cloud native as the environment of choice.
• 2021 will see autonomous assurance projects be mostly in POC.

Application development is moving to cloud native as the environment of choice

The move from virtual machines to Kubernetes in 2021 will accelerate

Globally, the use of legacy applications remains flat at 19.3% of the market, while in Latin America & the Caribbean, legacy use is set to increase by 0.5% between 2020 and 2022. The static legacy market indicates the long potential tail for cloud computing and the fact that these workloads are remaining in legacy environments indicates the value equation is still weighted in favor of the challenges. By contrast, the virtual machine (VM)-based workloads (see Figure 1) show a steady decline, with cloud-native environments benefiting from this move. Globally, the decline in VM-based workloads is expected to be just over 3% between 2020 and the end of 2021. However, China expects to move from over 52% VM-based applications today to just over 48% in 2022, with legacy workloads dropping from 19% to just over 17% in the same period. This near-6% move away from traditional technologies is being equally distributed between serverless and containers. Omdia believes that the move to adopt the cloud-native technologies in China at a faster pace than the global average demonstrates a desire by Chinese companies to become leaders in the new cloud era.

When looking at the market verticals, healthcare demonstrates a preference for container technologies over serverless. Between 2020 and 2022, container use is predicted to grow almost 4x that of serverless in the healthcare sector. Retail shows a similar preference for container technologies with serverless only predicted to increase by 1.4% from 2020 to 2022, while container use is expected to increase by 2.7% over the same time period. Retail also shows a variation from the global trend, with a 0.7% increased use of legacy and a significant shift from VMs (a decline of 4.7%), driving the modernization strategy.

Government shows a preference for serverless with its use increasing by 2.4% between 2020 and 2022, compared to 2.3% for containers, with the majority of workloads moving from VMs, although a small 0.8% decline in legacy is expected over this time period. Omdia considers this shift in government toward cloud-native to be a result of the timing of government technology refresh cycles coinciding with the maturing of cloud-native.

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with annual revenue less than $499m showed a moderate increase in cloud-native use at the expense of VMs, a swing of 3.4%. This was similar to large organizations (greater than $20bn in annual revenue), the difference being large organizations’ use of cloud-native was more advanced, representing 36.3% of all workloads by 2022 compared to 33.5% of all workloads for SMBs.

Figure 1: Organizations’ planned use of software environments: 2022 vs. 2020

Source: IoT, Cloud, AI & 5G – ICT Enterprise Insights 2021, Omdia

2021 will see autonomous assurance projects be mostly in POC

Delivering successful customer-centric service delivery requires a more integrated DevOps process

DevOps is about transforming the IT development and IT operational processes. While it has made these teams more aligned there still exists some areas where activity remains silo’ed. As organizations look to adopt a new more customer-centric approach to IT the concept of service delivery has gain traction. Omdia defines service delivery as where IT activity delivers a service for a customer that produces an outcome that the customer values and where the customer does not need to manage the outcome’s costs and risks. The current level of DevOps integration has one significant area that is creating a challenge for organizations wanting to adopt service delivery, namely software testing. To integrate software testing with DevOps requires autonomous assurance. Omdia defines autonomous assurance as the ability to generate test scripts and execute them based on the degree of change to the application and the likely business impact. By adding autonomous assurance to the DevOps process the software lifecycle process is streamlined and IT operations can clearly see the degree of risk associated with a change, based on the autonomous assurance reports, and so take the appropriate action.

Market analysis

The result of the Omdia survey discovered that autonomous assurance in 2020 was mostly in the discussion phase of deployment, see Figure 2. In fact, 72% of respondents reported they were discussing the technology, and 16% were conducting proof of concept (PoC) trials in 2020. By the end of 2021, the majority of discussions, 56%, will move to PoC, 34% will be in the testing phase by 2022, 31% will begin ramping up in production in 2023, and 40% will be fully deployed by 2024.

However, the market differs by vertical and size of the organizations. For large organizations, $1bn plus in revenue, 100% of organizations have plans to deploy autonomous assurance, and by 2024 nearly 90% of the organizations will be fully deployed. This contrasts to the very-small organizations with revenues less than $50M, where 62% will be fully deployed by 2023, but 15% either have no plans or have not considered autonomous assurance.

Figure 2: Understanding the maturity of Autonomous testing

Source Omdia

In terms of the market verticals, retail was a leading candidate, with 100% of respondents stating they will complete discussion phase on the topic by the end of 2021. However, the impact of covid-19 on the retail sector has forced it to defer PoC from 2022 to 2023/24, as the sector looks to reevaluate its priorities on IT projects. By contrast, financial services reported 67% were in discussion about autonomous assurance in 2020. In 2021, 67% are expected to move to PoC, with 66% moving to testing in 2022, and 92% will be fully deployed by 2024. 

The analysis of verticals by intention to adopt new microservices approaches (see Figure 3) to application development shows that autonomous assurance is not seen as a required technology. The survey found that in retail a 40% increase in use of microservices approach is planned, between 2020 and 2022, but autonomous assurance will only be fully deployed by 20% of the retail organizations by 2022. This is in comparison to financial services, where autonomous assurance will be 53% deployed by 2022 and the increased use of microservices over the same time period will be 12%. Retail and financial services also differ in their views on DevOps. In financial services, 67% stated that improving DevOps was a strong driver to using autonomous assurance, while in retail it was 100% that made the connection. The conclusion is that autonomous assurance is being used by different organizations to solve different problems, but they are all linked to the increased complexity of the environment and the need for more efficient and effective ways of improving the DevOps processes.

Figure 3: Industries adoption of microservices

Source Omdia