10 Hottest DevOps trends of 2018
- 20.07.2018
- DevOps
- 0
2017 brought lots of great advances for IT industry, like the introduction of managed Kubernetes services from various CSPs, native Kubernetes support from Docker, skyrocketing the serverless computing, etc. What is hot in 2018 though?
In order to remain competitive and stay ahead of the market, every DevOps team must be aware of the latest tech and hottest trends in the field of DevOps services and tools. As Spaceport team specializes at providing DevOps-as-a-Service, we are always keeping a close eye on the latest developments in the industry, and below are the 10 hottest DevOps trends of 2018.
DevSecOps: DevOps combined with security
When nearly 140 millions of Americans lost their medical data back in 2017 due to the Equifax security breach. However, the danger still remains, as data hacking and malevolent use of security loopholes poses significant danger to businesses and individuals. Only the companies that add the security measures to all stages of their software delivery can hope to overcome this challenge. DevSecOps is a trend of building the security measures from the very beginning of the workflow to ensure maximum protection of your products, services and systems.
More DevOps management capabilities
The leaders of the IT industry across the globe are forming a habit of turning their DevOps teams from underlings into managers. This is totally justified, as the DevOps adoption was on the rise in 2017 according to Puppet, and many DevOps teams are becoming the drivers of innovation they are meant to be, not the mere executors of orders down a long line of managers. Having a DevOps representative amongst the board of directors actually helps the businesses to justify and perform the steps towards accomplishing their digital transformation — and becoming more competitive as a result.
More Dev than Ops
One of the main goals of transition to DevOps is automating various routine IT infrastructure management processes in order to free up the valuable time and resources. This, in turn, means the businesses are able to drive more value to the customers. When the majority of repetitive maintenance tasks is performed using configuration orchestration tools like Terraform or Kubernetes and automated pipelines built with Jenkins and Ansible, this allows DevOps engineers to manage the immutable Infrastructure as Code (IaC), enabling the Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) of new code for your products.
ChatOps instead of CLI
Chatbots are on the rise and they enable DevOps teams to perform multiple tasks from the convenience of their chats and messengers. This is much better than monitoring the system performance through a dashboard and manually issuing the required commands to the CLI tool or clicking the buttons in multiple tabs in response to an email/SMS notification. Instead, once the smart alert is received through a chat, a DevOps specialist can invoke the predefined script and the bot will automatically login where needed and perform all the required actions.
Microservices are the next stage of the software evolution… or not
The idea of splitting monolithic application into separate microservices promised to solve multiple issues with resource usage, operational stability, ease of development, speed of product delivery, etc. However, the microsevices have brought the new scope of problems and many cloud architects and software developers are now at the peak of disillusionment of the Gartner’s hype cycle.
The most advanced of the experts have already crossed the chasm of disillusionment and are now steadily climbing up the slope of enlightenment towards the plateau of productivity. The solutions to the issues related to microservices are being introduced at a steady pace, as the Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) release new microservice-oriented additions to their offers. Microservices will not solve all the issues, but they definitely do make the application development and maintenance much easier.
Service Meshes — a new concept for the service management
The concept of service meshes was introduced quite recently yet it affects the DevOps world immensely today. In simple words, a service mesh is an infrastructure layer dedicated to enabling and simplifying the service-to-service communications. It works with Kubernetes clusters of Docker containers, microservices or serverless computing, as well as traditional VMs to greatly simplify the service discovery, management and load balancing, amongst other benefits.. As a sign of the importance of this trend, the leading providers of load balancing tools, namely the HAProxy, Traefik and NGINX now position themselves as the data planes.
Common infrastructures for several CSPs
One of the latest DevOps trends involves combining the offers of several Cloud Service Providers to form cost-efficient and highly-performant infrastructures. Such cloud-agnostic approach is possible due to the fact the AWS, Azure and GCP offer quite the same set of the core features, and the Terraform manifests work equally well with any of the Big Three CSPs, enabling the cloud architects to build complex systems that combine the best offers from several cloud platforms at once.
RedHat OpenShift is on the prowl
The mastodons of telecom industry and banking rarely opt for public cloud services, preferring to build private cloud datacenters instead. As such clouds are mostly run on Linux, RedHat Openshift is a great solution for them, allowing to spin up virtual environments for containers and offering rich software development and delivery options. Due to the convenience of management and unparalleled security, Openshift becomes the production-ready solution for enterprise-grade workloads offered by financial and telecom industry leaders.
The rise of serverless computing or FaaS
AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions or IBM Functions — all of these are the examples of serverless computing or Functions-as-a-Service. This is best used as a glue between multiple system components or as for event-triggered short-time computing tasks. Without the need to pay for the upkeep of the infrastructure and due to the great simplicity and convenience of using this feature, serverless computing is on the rise. For example, AWS reports that AWS Lambda usage grew 200% from 2016 to 2017 (from 12% to 24% of AWS customers).
Predictive security instead of permanent dealing with the breach damage
Modern day tools give the DevOps team much more control over the security aspect of their infrastructure. We are now able to stress-test our infrastructures, find possible security breaches and close them before the hackers could use them. When coupled with DevSecOps practices of adding the security checks to the processes of software development and deployment, predictive security can help the businesses to stay on the safe side and be prepared for possible security breach attempts.
Conclusions on the hottest trends for DevOps in 2018
As you can see, the constant evolution of DevOps services and tools has given the businesses of all sizes the possibility to revamp and improve their IT operations. Building cloud-agnostic service mesh layers of infrastructure, deploying predictive security practices and DevSecOps approach to software delivery, leveraging the serverless computing benefits along with microservices, automating the routine operations to free up the resources to work on improving the value delivery — all of this leads to more fluent operations, faster project completion with better outcomes, improved customer experience and bigger profits. Of course, this is impossible if DevOps are excluded from the process of decision-making and can’t influence the company vision and strategy.
At Spaceport we are well-aware of these trends and have ample experience with applying them in practice. We stand ready to help you transition to the cloud, improve the existing cloud infrastructure or update your workflow to better use the latest DevOps trends. If you need help with anything — just let us know!