DevOps has been a recognised field for more than ten years now and has rapidly become the standard practice for IT departments in their dealings with developers.
The term DevOps denotes the consolidation of software development and IT operations departments into a cohesive and integrated group within a company.
Conventionally, application development and its management were separate processes, with software engineers and IT departments handling the respective roles. This caused significant inefficiencies as IT personnel struggled to maintain the software developed by developers, owing to differences in objectives, responsibilities, and directives. DevOps has revolutionised this by fostering collaboration between the teams to ensure the stability of production systems.
The growing adoption of DevOps can be attributed largely to its potential to boost a company’s profits. With the reduction of software deployment time from weeks to just a few hours, businesses can now promptly respond to the evolving needs of their customers and adapt their business strategies accordingly. Moreover, DevOps has proven effective in minimizing downtime thereby increasing company resilience.
Regardless of what the future may bring
As DevOps evolves from being an IT operations-oriented field to one focused on achieving business objectives, it is expected that this emphasis on delivering positive outcomes will continue to be its hallmark. Teams in DevOps are likely to be identified based on their purpose, rather than their role, to enable a product-centred approach. These are some of the projected alterations:
- Offers teams that are mutually beneficial for both companies and their clients
- Enablement teams offer guidance and internal consultation.
- The platform team developers will assist in feature development.
- Teams specialised in mainframes and other specific hardware (also referred to as infrastructure or platform teams)
In recent times, there has been a move towards more equitable and team-oriented styles of leadership in companies. This has prompted a transformation in the management of these groups.
Methodology versus Procedure
Currently, DevOps is primarily an internal, process-driven field. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are centred on the team’s deliverables, activities, and products. Over time, KPIs will increasingly prioritise tangible benefits for customers and stakeholders. By adopting DevOps methodologies, value streams that emphasise pace and business adaptability will be optimised.
The widespread adoption of DevOps is mostly hinged on automating mundane and repetitive tasks. Automating governance, compliance, security, and standardising IT procedures are vital components of this narrative.
A classification of roles into those that are appropriate for automation and those that require human skills is suggested. Examples of tasks that can generate value and on which highly skilled developers and IT experts can spend more time with the help of automation include exception handling, solution creation, and addressing novel challenges.
Cybersecurity is emerging as a critical concern.
Presently, cybersecurity is a significant concern for executives to ponder over. Cybercriminals can potentially compromise the security of any organisation, underscoring the need to secure code released into production, notably with Agile development methods resulting in a faster code deployment pace.
The next step of DevOps is DevSecOps, which integrates security best practices into the development, testing, and deployment processes. In order to accomplish this, we will integrate key security measures such as multi-factor authentication and include security teams in the initial phases of application conceptualisation. This way, we will be able to uplift our organisation’s security stance and responsiveness.
Swivel-chair integration, where an employee manually enters change requests into a service desk system like ServiceNow, will be replaced by code-based change management. In the future, service desk management technologies will be more closely integrated with DevOps pipelines. This will reduce errors and accelerate release cycles, provided all change requests are completed before deployment.
Automated Platforms and Procedures
As DevOps continues to develop, the importance of automation in the process will become increasingly visible. The DevOps community is veering away from siloed solutions towards comprehensive Software Development Life Cycle pipelines deployed on dedicated infrastructure. These systems may contain Machine Learning operations, an integrated Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery/Continuous Deployment Release Automation architecture, low-code/no-code development abilities, and extend to the network’s periphery.
Deploying automated risk management procedures necessitates accurate and current data. Thus, in the future development of pipelines, machine learning algorithms will become increasingly crucial for risk analysis.
DevOps’ Focus Will Shift to Include its Users.
In essence, DevOps is about enhancing the efficiency of collaboration among individuals. DevOps best practices, such as continuous integration/continuous delivery, automation, and software maintenance/support, are simply the base of a thriving DevOps implementation. To achieve the best possible outcomes, organisations need to adopt the DevOps mindset on a broader scale.
The variety of backgrounds in the present teams makes them well-suited for collaborating on problem-solving and providing aid. We aim to decrease the reliance on tier 2 support, as intricate concerns can be directly elevated to the product teams, while tier 1 assistance will be extended to handle minor issues.
