It’s been nearly ten years since Patrick Debois coined the term ‘DevOps’, and since then it has grown from simply a trending buzzword to the accepted methodology for delivering software quickly and efficiently.

The rise of DevOps is hardly surprising considering the fact that implementing DevOps practices has been shown to improve organisation performance and outcomes, with elite DevOps teams seeing 46 times more frequent code deployments, and 2,555 times faster lead time from commit to deploy.

But, despite it now being such an established practice, that doesn’t mean that DevOps is going to stay the same. In fact, we already saw massive changes to DevOps during 2018, but it’s more than likely that the methodology, the practice and the ecosystem will continue to evolve as we enter this new year.

So, whilst it still remains conjecture, and no one can entirely predict the future – least of all for something so rapidly evolving as DevOps. However, having spoken to quite a few leaders in the DevOps field this year, here’s the six things that – based off their thoughts on the industry – we think we can expect to see in 2019:

1. Automation will remain key

One of the main focuses for DevOps moving into 2019 is more than likely going to remain on automating operations to enable businesses to deliver on-premise services faster and reduce operational costs. It’s pretty simply logic; DevOps already enables businesses to improve their performance, speed and efficiency, but the way to make that even better is to automate parts of the process.

Indeed, Ian Miell, Lead OpenShift Architect at a Tier One bank, maintained that it was the trend that he was most excited about looking forward. As he put it, “Automation is my thing, so I’m exceptionally interested to see how the tooling around that is going to explode moving forward…take Kubernetes, which already takes the concept of the server to a developer so they can deploy an application onto an infrastructure that exists in an API…and Terraform is also interesting because it’s providing a way to repeatedly automate your infrastructure set up”. Clearly, the writing is already very much on the wall when it comes to the development of automation and it’s use in DevOps methodology, and the interest is already there, but it’ll certainly be interesting to see how businesses start harnessing the concept of automation and – more critically – where in the DevOps process they choose to implement it.  

2. The continued rise of the SRE

As DevOps and continuous integration moved from just a cool thing to try, to an absolute must have for business success, the very nature of IT Ops has changed. As a result, this year we’ve seen an increasing trend to the acceptance of a new breed of IT operations professionals: the site reliability engineers (SRE). And this is a trend we don’t expect to see slow down anytime soon, least of all in 2019. As ops professionals start to work on their software development skills in order to collaborate more effectively with developers, these individuals are going to take more of a centre stage in the world of DevOps.

This is an opinion that Aubrey Stearn, ex Head of DevOps at Arcadia, is definitely onboard with. When asked trend she was most excited about, and expected to see, Aubrey maintained that ‘People are slowly understanding that part of the SRE role is educational, and that they are placed in a DevOps team to be learnt from…so I’m definitely seeing more people buying into what SRE is and understanding that platform engineering is fundamentally the future”.  Clearly, the future includes 2019, so we wouldn’t be surprised to see a massive increase in SRE roles being advertised next year…if you’re looking for your next one or trying to find yourself an SRE for your DevOps team, get in touch here!

3. The power of artificial intelligence will be harnessed

Artificial intelligence has found its way into almost every industry, and DevOps is no exception. The fact that companies that have implemented DevOps have seen increased business suggests that, in 2019, we will increasingly see data science and application development teams working together in order to improve the efficiency of development and deployment by utilising this technology. Although it might be a long-way off; after all, there’s been no definitive movements to bring AI into the DevOps process this year, Bryan Ross – Platform Engineering Manager at the UK’s largest telecommunications company – called artificial intelligence out as one of the most exciting areas for development.

As he sees it, businesses are now ‘harnessing it to enhance decision making, to drive new ecosystems, and to let systems interact with us and our surroundings more intelligently. In the context of DevOps, whilst we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible here, we’re already seeing a move from traditional threshold-based analysis of individual server performance to an increased reliance upon anomaly detection to find issues with large, distributed systems”. So clearly, it is possible to harness artificial intelligence to better DevOps, the question of 2019 will just be how exactly this will be done…

4. Tools will become increasingly standardised

According to Bryan Ross, over the next six to twelve months we can all expect to find more standardised tooling around working with Kubernetes. Acknowledging that there is already a plethora of open source tools on the market, with more being released every day, Bryan maintained that – looking forward – there will be a convergence of mainstream tools that unifies DevOps procedures. This opinion is shared by Ian Miell, who similarly stated that, over the next year, “because it’s operations and not development, you will usually see an explosion of technologies around a hot area, and then we can expect consolidation to a few key areas”. So, seeing as 2018 has been a huge boom year for DevOps, we can expect that over 2019 we will quickly see some standardisation and some frontrunners when it comes to tools and technologies.

5. DevOps will be pivotal to seamless security integration

As organisations focus on how they develop and deploy quicker, and smarter, they also need to be mindful of their security measures. And, with approximately 30% of all breaches resulting from a vulnerability at the application layer, we will most definitely be seeing a huge focus on security we enter 2019. Couple this with the focus we have seen on data security and privacy in general 2018; with GDPR, notable security breaches at the likes of British Airways and fears that the technical skills gap is leaving UK businesses open to security threats, and it won’t be a surprise to see DevOps playing a pivotal role as the enabler of security integration, and empowering deployment teams to deliver secure code faster than ever before.

6. Serverless technology will take off

If there’s one thing that’s constant in the DevOps buzz for next year, it’s serverless technology. Indeed, according to analysts at research and markets, serverless computing and this abstraction are driving the function-as-a-service market at a phenomenal rate. So much so, that the company expects the market to grow by almost 33% annually, reaching $7.72 billion by 2021. With this in mind, it’s no wonder that Kevin Goldsmith, ex VP of Engineering at Spotify, and with stints at both Adobe and Microsoft, saw “the future of serverless, and the ability to orchestrate serverless in the sense of scripting your entire infrastructure and having serverless be part of that” as one of the most exciting trends in the future of DevOps.  

Clearly, we can expect a lot from DevOps in 2019, and the ecosystem definitely won’t be slowing down any time soon. Now, more than ever, it is one of the most exciting times to be part of the technology industry, and if even one of these predictions is true then this won’t change for the next few years.

If you want to get ahead of these trends, build out your team for the new year, or find your new, perfect role before these trends start becoming old new, then get in touch with one of our specialist DevOps consultants for a chat.