To keep up with the dynamic requirements of the business environment, DevOps’ significance is on the rise. A recent market study predicts that the DevOps market will reach $20 billion in revenue by 2026, expanding at a CAGR of 24.7% from 2019 to 2026. The majority of factors influencing the growth of the DevOps market are organizations' growing desire for quick application delivery together with high quality leading to rising demand for DevOps solutions and services. According to these findings, DevOps ecosystem has proven to be an essential software development methodology for productive digital transformation.
The role of DevOps in enhancing product innovation
DevOps methodology can boost the capacity to produce applications and services at a high velocity. It enables organizations to enhance products more quickly than through conventional infrastructure management and software development processes. With this speed, businesses can improve customer satisfaction and better perform business operations.
The goal of the DevOps ecosystem is to release code as seamlessly and swiftly as possible by combining the development and operations teams. Establishing a cycle of continuous communication and a high degree of automation is necessary. The DevOps process guidelines state that the development team is also in charge of maintaining the code once it has been put into production. It implies that the development and operations teams, who have always worked independently, now work together to enhance software releases.
DevOps operations enable faster product innovation and improvement through increased frequency of delivery. Other advantages of DevOps include increased reliability, decreased risk, greater cooperation, and enhanced security.
Here, we’ve provided you with a fundamental understanding of DevOps. If you want to know more about DevOps, check out this article.
Top DevOps trends for 2023
Docker getting stronger
Docker is already the most popular container software, and because of that, it is always trending. But now, after introducing Docker&WASM integration, the hype will get much bigger. Combining those two components can enable new ways of building serverless platforms using WASM. The project is at the stage of technical preview.
WASM integration will bring many new possibilities. According to Mozilla Developers Network, Web Assembly, often shortened to WASM, is “[...] a new type of code that can be run in modern web browsers — it is a low-level assembly-like language with a compact binary format that runs with near-native performance and provides languages such as C/C++, C# and Rust with a compilation target so that they can run on the web. It is also designed to run alongside JavaScript, allowing both to work together.”
WebAssembly has big implications for online platforms since it allows you to execute code written in many languages on the web with client programs running on the web that previously could not.
Docker having WASM implementation will definitely upgrade its performance in 2023. Even though there are some concerns related to a shortage of developers, feedback loop, or possible paths to production, Docker&WASM continuous integration will for sure make it easier to build applications quickly.
Serverless
Serverless is a cloud-native development model that enables developers to create and execute apps without the need for server maintenance. The regular task of establishing, maintaining, and scaling the server infrastructure is handled by a cloud provider. For continuous deployment, developers may simply place their code in containers. Moreover, computing services, such as AWS Lambda, enables you to run code for any type of application or backend server without managing infrastructure. Your code is stored and executed on a server, but the management is done by AWS.
It is already a well-known concept which hasn't reached its full potential yet. However, as serverless computing offers many advantages, it becomes increasingly difficult for modern enterprises to ignore this trend. Efficiency and reliability are two major advantages of serverless computing.
Moreover, this approach allows developers to focus on coding and reducing the risk of failure due to misconfigurations in managing infrastructure. As in the first point, more implementations allow serverless to become more relevant and, by that, more popular among enterprises. In the future, we can expect a steady growth of implementations allowing developers to stay focused on more creative work.
Chaos engineering
This is also not a newcomer, but still, it is persistent in software development. The main goal of the “chaotic” approach to development is to orient the mindset of people who create software toward scenarios when things are going to go bad eventually.
This philosophy aligns with the DevOps workflow (and also Codilime!) philosophy of disrupting to provide good quality products. It is also controversial due to the idea of testing in production. A good example of production-disrupting software is Chaotic Monkey. It stops services, containers, and VMs in previously-set periods of time (e.g., excluding weekends). And that is the possible reason why this approach has yet to become popular: it reveals technical debt and other issues related to being unprepared for inevitable failure. So it is good to watch this topic because of the growing DevOps process that allows the reduction of technical debt and, as a result, more time for providing stable products.
The X-Ops
For the years to come, we hear of numerous trending positions such as NoOps, DevSecOps, GitOps, AIOps, MLOps, and a few more. It shows a trend for combining roles and also a high demand for those roles. All of these positions more or less start from the point of knowledge of regular DevOps practices. With all of that knowledge, we can assume that in the future more of those roles are going to be merged together.
Kubernetes & microservices
Kubernetes is a well-known and appreciated technology. Developing software in microservices architecture can often be beneficial for performance but mostly for maintenance and future development. This approach allows developers to build small “parts” of whole applications interconnected with each other. This also enables better testing, changing, debugging, and scaling in the future. The main drawbacks are the need for a well-thought-out application structure at the beginning and the temptation to over-engineer. But here comes Kubernetes, which (when handled properly) simplifies the entire process or sometimes even enables it for projects. In small projects, this could be overkill, but if apps are getting more complex, trying Kubernetes might be beneficial.
If you are interested in the topic, you should check out our pages related to Kubernetes and microservices, where you can find relevant articles.
Conclusion
Even though some of these top DevOps trends are not brand-new, they are undoubtedly improving in functionality and development. Therefore, it is worth learning more about them. As we said earlier, DevOps operations are constantly evolving, and their position seems to be seen as an indispensable software development methodology.
