DEVOPS TRENDS 2020

Here is a list of TOP-12 DevOps trends for 2020-2021. Think ahead with Alpacked!

The term GitOps was presented in 2018 by Weaveworks company. Briefly, it's the approach to perform the operations in the same way as developer teams usually do when working with git. When we are talking about general git flow - for any application code, you have git repository, where you define your application and git serves as a single source of truth (ideally, but it is not the case sometimes, almost everyone had experience where changes were applied directly in production to quickly fix something).

So the similar git flow approach is being applied to any Operations, git serves as a single source of truth. And only the CD instrument, that is connected to it, has ability and permissions to update the configuration and/or infrastructure.

Long story in a few words - with emerging of more and more tools that natively allow gitops (JenkinsX, ArgoCD, Tekton, Spinnaker, Flux) - more companies see the benefit to start using this in their day-to-day work.

Most companies implement cloud computing to make the application scalable and gain availability up to 99%. Building cloud-native applications allow developers to utilize the maximum of the resources possible and automate the installation, provisioning, and configuration of these resources. We noticed more clients would prefer to rebuild the infrastructure and make the application cloud-native rather than trying to keep it afloat. It is driven by the desire to invest more in IT to increase revenue.

This trend means that businesses shifted their focus from "choosing a cloud to save" to "I want my business to grow".

RightScale reported as far back as in 2018 that serverless is the fastest growing technology among other cloud services. We noticed that our partners and clients consider serverless solutions not only because of its cost-effectiveness, but they like the fact that cloud providers take over the responsibility for the server management.

This allows to kick back the headache with infrastructure management and focus on the satisfaction of the customer needs. This approach is mostly used by e-commerce businesses (see our case study on building a serverless data pipeline for an online-store) and startups.

The hybrid and multi-cloud solution will definitely thrive. This approach is a quite logical consequence of technology evolution since developers have adapted to combine tools to squeeze the maximum benefit out of them.

Overwhelmingly large- and mid-sized companies have a multi-cloud strategy, but small businesses and startups also admitted this method to be the most acceptable to meet all business and technical needs. For instance, it allows devs to make the application scalable and affordable at the same time. Thus, now plenty of applications are developed to run both on-prem and in the cloud (or even in the multiple clouds).

Multi-cloud adoption by types by 2020:

• Single-cloud - 28%
• Multi-cloud low interoperability - 40%
• Multi-cloud high interoperability - 24%
• Hybrid - 7%

Kubernetes itself is not a trend, it virtually becomes a standard for application development. But Kubernetes in tandem with serverless kicks into high gear. The reason for this is, first of all, an interest in serverless and never-ending hype around k8s. Besides, Google continues actively supporting the contributions to Knative - a k8s-based platform to build, deploy, and provision the serverless infrastructure.

A big boost of open source projects like Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform is conditioned foremost upon its extreme flexibility and regular updates. Beyond that, companies are eager to contribute to the open source tools because it opens new opportunities for them and creates a sense of importance.

And the last but not least - companies save thousands of dollars by using open source tools instead of enterprise products.

We can definitely say that the hype of NoSQL databases is over, after the big spike of Mongodb, Cassandra, CosmosDB, CouchDB and other tools. We can definitely see that Relational databases are still at the top and gaining more and more popularity again.

Why does this happen? After several years of production usage of NoSQL databases more companies tend to look for choosing Databases that allow such level of horizontal scaling as in NoSQL databases, and the support of ACID principles. While companies decide to sacrifice the scaling towards consistency we will see databases like AWS Aurora RDS or Google spanner gaining more features. So teams will be able to use all the features they require.

Today companies pay more and more attention to the cybersecurity issues because of system vulnerabilities and increasing legislative pressure on the online businesses. Thus, security is embedded in the application development workflow and became its essential part and everyone became responsible for it.

With proper CICD flows - various vulnerability tests and automated scans are performed on each stage of the development process. Moreover, these assessments are not only applied against the code, but also against infrastructure, so with more and more evolving trend of Infrastructure as Code approaches, it is possible to have more mature process of delivery code from developer local machine to production.

DevOps trends in 2020 are not only about technologies, they are also about business approach. Eveline Oehrlich reported that businesses are ready to invest in the skills pumping and help specialists grow. Besides, they admit the importance of cross-skilling to rise the T-shaped experts - exactly what DevOps practices ideally require.

Beyond the skills pumping and development of the related knowledge, companies finally understood the importance of the value stream. Thus, specialists don't just "do a task", they do and understand the value brought to the project. By having the value stream set up, companies get a more motivated team, which understands the principles of end-to-end workflow.

This understanding enables us to approach to DevOps best practices by removing silos between IT and non-IT department which makes a company dream real.

DevOps trends in 2020 are a logical sequel from previous years - companies became more focused on technology excellence and are leaning towards the focus for people rather than only business. Due to this tendency the DevOps approach may rise even more in the next few years. Adding into this situation lots of the tools that resolve automation issues, infrastructure support and "everything in git" we will see improvements in the change management process and the removal of silos between teams.