DevOps Trends for 2022

DevOps continue to revolutionize the industry by redefining how IT operations and software applications are developed and managed. DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) are among the most embraced development framework trends of the last decade. Hardly a surprise considering the DevOps market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 24.7%, valued at $10.31 billion by 2023, according to Markets and Markets.

As the leading model for application delivery, DevOps is showing no signs of slowing down. The industry continues to look for ways to optimize and speed up development to be much more productive and deliver better business value. That has led to several companies adopting new processes, workflows, roles, and technologies.

With this ever-evolving landscape, it’s imperative to remain aware of the latest trends in DevOps and how you can leverage them for your business. This article presents you with the top 10 DevOps trends to watch for in 2022.

Bye-Bye Monoliths; Hello To Microservices

As organizations rue the disadvantages of locking themselves into monolithic architecture, microservices continue to gain traction as the best alternative to realizing digital transformation. In an O’Reilly survey on Microservices Adoption in 2020, 77% of respondents say they use microservices. 29% are betting big on it by migrating or shifting the entire architecture to microservices.

By moving away from monolithic applications to microservices and containers, companies can break down large, complex applications into smaller, modular components and services that are highly flexible and scalable. That is in contrast to monolithic architectures that keep services and components in one place.

Adopting microservices means that organizations can rapidly deploy small changes or functionality without scaling or breaking the entire system. That is not true with a monolithic architecture. Every addition or change implies testing, building, and scaling; A failure in one of the services can bring down the overall architecture.

That doesn’t mean you’re entirely free from vulnerabilities. The inherent nature of microservices—with their multiple connections—emphasizes the need for test automation. Otherwise, you face hefty risks and vulnerabilities that can be devastating for your application.

The trend of transitioning to microservices is inevitable for organizations adopting DevOps owing to its advantages: agility, modularity, efficiency, and flexibility to innovate.

DevSecOps Taking Center Stage

As security vulnerabilities become more prevalent and negatively impact businesses, security is fast becoming a necessary focus. According to Google’s Accelerate State of DevOps report, companies that integrate security best practices into their DevOps pipeline have a higher chance of meeting or exceeding business goals. One of these best practices involves integrating security testing into the entire application development process, a practice known as DevSecOps.

Traditionally, most organizations leave security until much later in the development process. That can leave applications vulnerable. The DevSecOps approach is a development process that integrates security into the entire development pipeline. That way, security is not seen as an afterthought but as part of the development process. DevSecOps adoption will continue into 2022, with Gartner predicting that 90% of software development projects will claim to be following DevSecOps practices, up from 40% in 2019.

To implement DevSecOps, you should:

• Build security from the start and conduct unit tests

• Use test automation and monitoring tools

• Track everything

• Implement best practices and guidelines for developers and engineers

• Verify and test every dependency and third-party library for vulnerabilities

The Year Of The Ops: DataOps, NoOps, AIOps, MLOps

Automation is the new buzzword. Modern technology is enhancing a large part of companies’ operations. Gartner predicts that 40% of DevOps teams will augment application monitoring capabilities with artificial intelligence in 2023. In the meantime, these efforts will lead to more adoption of processes that facilitate their implementation. Hence, higher adoption of AIOps, DataOps, and MLOps.

With the introduction of AI and ML into DevOps, strategies, policies, alerts, and decisions that traditionally require programming, planning, or configuration will be automated. AI, ML, and data science can help DevOps teams solve problems faster and more efficiently, adding more automation and increasing productivity. By eliminating or reducing human interaction, you can realize the NoOps dream. The adoption of these processes will be one of the biggest agile DevOps trends in 2022.

Read More: DevOps Automation: How It Works

The Rise of Serverless Architecture

Following the increase in cloud adoption, serverless architecture is next in line. Serverless architecture is the process of building and deploying applications without having to manage infrastructure. As a result, it will simplify your workload by removing scaling, provisioning, and maintenance tasks. You only need to pay for what you use.

Cloud service providers take full responsibility for managing architecture. That means developers can concentrate on developing applications, reducing costs, facilitating flexible workflow, and saving time. The two essential elements of serverless architecture are Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) and Function-as-a-Service (FaaS). The serverless architecture market is expected to grow to $21.1 billion by 2025, up from $7.6 billion in 2020. In light of these, more organizations are likely to adopt a serverless architecture moving forward.

Remote and Cloud Is Here to Stay

The year 2020 was all about remote work, and this trend is bound to continue into 2022. While it was strange to operate completely remotely before 2020, it has paved the way for greater adoption of production and collaboration tools. In the same vein, remote work makes it necessary for businesses to accelerate digital transformation five years ahead of schedule. In light of these, more organizations are embracing cloud-based technologies and architecture such as SaaS.

Read More: Oshyn’s Tools For DevOps

The Making of More DevOps Engineers

It’s hardly surprising that DevOps engineers are in high demand, given the high adoption rate of DevOps. In a 2021 survey by CodeInGame, DevOps engineers ranked top of the list for the most in-demand developer role. In addition to this, almost half (43%) of hiring professionals find it difficult to fill DevOps roles. In such scenarios, most organizations will train and promote internal developers for these positions.

Similarly, there’s been high adoption of DevSecOps as a means to manage cybersecurity risks and build more reliable systems. Furthermore, more developers will have an opportunity to incorporate security into applications and set security standards within their organizations.

With all this in mind, more engineers are likely to transition to DevOps roles in the coming years from other developer roles.

Testing Better With Chaos Engineering

With the advent of “release fast, fail fast, and iterate,” efficiently automating development processes is proving increasingly difficult. If you’ve ever had to rush to work to address an application failure in production, then you’ll value the importance of chaos engineering.

Chaos engineering is a discipline within DevOps that enables experimenting & testing software in production to be more resilient to unforeseen issues or issues that aren’t detected by other testing methods.

Due to the diverse platforms that exist in an organization, digital solutions often require a great deal of interdependence. The complex nature of this architecture makes it difficult to plan for since infrastructure is everywhere. As Jim Scheibmeir puts it, “avoiding chaos engineering is equivalent to embracing crisis engineering.” As companies become more security-conscious, chaos engineering can help find security flaws and predict system crashes. To implement chaos engineering, you must:

• Learn to identify weaknesses and gaps in a system

• Establish the standards you want the system to follow

• Conduct a lot of tests, research, and improve

Embracing Self-Service Platforms

Self-service platforms offer organizations the flexibility to provide end-to-end digital services that are low cost and easy to deploy. With it, both customers and employees experience consistency across all channels, and it provides a unified view of the customer. For instance, platform-as-a-product is proving to be a more successful way of defining, refining, and operating internal platforms for organizations seeking to limit the cognitive load of their team members.

According to Puppet’s State of DevOps report of 2020, 63% of organizations use at least one self-service internal platform. Companies with a high level of DevOps evolution report high usage of internal platforms. That figure will increase as teams reach for higher levels of DevOps evolution.

Low-Code Automation and Adoption

As more organizations embrace remote, they’re also embracing low-code platforms to build, test, and deploy software. According to a survey carried out by Appian, 80% of respondents say ‘low-code can free up developer time to work on higher-level projects. By doing that, companies will tremendously build faster and overall increase their productivity. That’ll be in line with the DevOps practice of rapid development.

In line with the DevOps trends of 2020 and 2021, low-code adoption is set to take a more prominent role in 2022.

Developers Becoming More Involved as Decision Makers

As organizations strive for digital transformation and better business value, developers will increasingly take on more roles and become more involved in the entire development cycle. That has been the game-changer with DevOps as it helps to bridge collaboration, eliminating silos in the process. The curious nature of engineers makes it easy for them to learn new things.

Nonetheless, more often than not, owners and managers won’t have a technical background, so this may not be their strong suit. Because of that, business leaders are starting to realize they can’t simply come up with ideas on how products or environments should look and then leave it to engineers. Rather, engineers should participate more in decision-making.

By 2022, DevOps teams will have more influence in decision-making, driving product strategy, and becoming more visible across the board.

Take Charge, Automate, and Optimize Your DevOps Processes

The undeniable truth is that DevOps will continue to witness changes as more businesses strive for better digital experiences and greater agility. The future of DevOps will seek more automation, decentralization, higher data analytics, better security, monitoring, and testing, and more adoption of cloud-based services.

Uptime by Oshyn ensures continuous feature updates, platform upgrades, and fast issue resolution. Uptime provides you with a strong DevOps toolchain to ensure your website is constantly improving, reliable, and secure, along with any other technology that drives your customers’ experiences.

The extensive knowledge we have and the tools we provide allow our customers to be at ease knowing that their website runs smoothly, regardless of issues that may arise. With Uptime, you can tailor your tech stack to suit your specific needs and track the most popular CMSs, including headless and traditional. If you want to know more about how Oshyn does DevOps, read more about Uptime by Oshyn here.