DevOps is continuing to grow in popularity, and for good reason. It allows businesses to release software faster and more efficiently. But what trends can we expect in DevOps in the coming year? After last year’s article on DevOps trends, we decided to rejoin Johan Janssen and Kilian Niemegeerts to talk about the DevOps trends for the past and coming year. 

Evolution, not Revolution

“If we look back at 2022, I think it’s fair to say that it’s been a year of evolution rather than revolution for DevOps,” said Johan. “We saw a lot of companies investing in their existing DevOps infrastructure and processes, rather than introducing something entirely new.”

“In the coming year of 2023, businesses are looking for DevOps maturity. By maturing their processes, organizations can reduce operational risks and achieve better predictability in their software development cycles. This means streamlining existing systems, increasing automation, and optimizing communication and collaboration between teams.”

Kilian adds: “Many organizations are starting to understand that DevOps is about more than just picking the right toolset. It’s about understanding the culture and processes in order to become agile, efficient, and secure. This means investment in the right people, training, and continuous improvement.”

Saturn Devours its Children

“In the beginning of 2022, we saw a lot of specialized sub-disciplines emerging in DevOps, such as DevSecOps, FinOps and AIOps,” says Kilian. “But we believe that these sub-disciplines will eventually be reabsorbed into the broader DevOps movement. Companies realize that a more holistic approach to DevOps is necessary for success, rather than trying to silo different aspects of development and operations.”

Johan adds, “As these sub-disciplines become more mature and refined, we expect to see more companies adopt a more integrated approach to DevOps, where security, communication, and AI are fully integrated into the development and operations process, rather than being treated as separate entities.”

The same applies to GitOps, another popular DevOps sub-discipline. According to Kilian, “Due to the increasing automation capabilities of modern DevOps tools, it makes sense to use a Git environment to manage infrastructure. It offers a number of benefits, such as the ability to version control infrastructure changes and enforce security policies. But for me, this has always been a best practice within the broader context of DevOps.”

Looking Forward

According to the FlowFactor founders, 2023 will mostly be a year of further maturation, though the gentlemen did have an interesting prediction about ChatOps. ChatOps is a part of AIOps, meaning that it is part of the next generation in DevOps automation technologies. ChatOps is used specifically to indicate the integration of automated tasks into the team’s conversation tools (like Slack), making it easier to collaborate and respond faster. Like the other DevOps offshoots, both founders are a bit sceptical about the added value of ChatOps:

Kilian: “I believe that currently, ChatOps is mainly a pass-through where the message comes in to the engineer and the engineer then indicates which solution should be implemented. However, I see the real added value being that the chat interface itself comes up with suggestions to offer a solution and that it comes up with proposals to optimize operational matters to prevent downtime. I could even see that after a while the system can execute certain actions autonomously. The chat interface would then only report to the engineer what has happened and why. Advanced language models can play an important role in this, but at this point, I still see the lack of added value.”

“We believe that ChatOps will be combined with advanced language models like ChatGPT to create more efficient operations,” says Kilian. “ChatOps has been a popular approach for communication and collaboration within the DevOps team, but by incorporating advanced language models like ChatGPT, we expect to see an even greater level of automation and efficiency in the operations process. For example, ChatGPT can be used to automate responses to common questions, freeing up human operators to focus on more complex tasks.”

Conclusion

As the DevOps movement continues to mature, it’s clear that there will be further specialization of sub-disciplines. But as Kilian and Johan have suggested, many of these sub-disciplines (such as DevSecOps and GitOps) will eventually be integrated into a more holistic DevOps approach. In addition, the future introduction of advanced language models like ChatGPT into the AIOps toolkit will help to create a more automated, efficient, and intuitive way for teams to collaborate and work more quickly. 

It’s clear that DevOps is here to stay as an integral part of modern software development. But as the landscape continues to evolve, it’ll be interesting to see what new approaches and technologies will emerge to make the process even more secure, streamlined, and efficient. We hope to see you back next year for the latest updates in DevOps. Until then, happy coding!