The fast-paced world of IT is constantly churning out new iterations and innovations designed to make the lives of businesses and consumers smarter, better and faster.
As we use and create advanced technology, our own processes must also progress to help us work as efficiently as the solutions we build for our clients. An example of this is the emergence of DevOps, which brings together development and operations.
Before DevOps began to merge about 10 years ago, the development team would give the product to the operations team, who would then deploy it independently. This lack of collaboration led to a lot of missed opportunities that would often end with suboptimal results.
The DevOps concept brings teams together to develop a product from start to finish using the expertise of both development and operations engineers throughout the entire lifecycle of an IT project.
There are plenty of innovations that are blooming under the umbrella of DevOps. In this article, we’ll take a look at three DevOps trends that all IT organizations should be keeping an eye on: one is just getting started, one exists and needs to continue to grow and one is a movement that more IT organizations should (and will) be using in the future.
on the rise: serverless computing
Cloud enablement, which includes moving to serverless computing, is a growing trend. Gartner forecasts that more than $1.3T in IT spending will be directly or indirectly affected by the shift to the cloud by 2022.
Cloud technology makes use of serverless computing by removing both physical and intangible barriers that IT organizations are forced to manage with fixed hardware and cumbersome data centres.
DevOps teams are the drivers of the serverless computing movement. When you’re serverless, you don’t need to run the application and the machine. IT teams can focus their efforts on innovating with the software, not the machine running the software.
Other benefits of removing burdensome machinery include lower costs associated with powering, cooling, storing and upgrading equipment, better scalability and faster innovation.
The efficiency of serverless computing will continue to grow—and it’s a trend that deserves to expand.
new trend alert: DevSecOps
Cloud technology comes with innumerable benefits and advantages. But like all technology, there are security risks.
In the summer of 2019, it was reported that Capital One bank had suffered an enormous data breach a few months before. More than 100 million credit card applications were exposed, including personal addresses, social security numbers and bank account numbers. The alleged culprit was a ‘cryptojacker’ who was charged with creating a program to scan cloud customers for a specific web application firewall misconfiguration.
One of the ways to combat crises like this is to embrace DevSecOps, a trend that embeds security into every line of code, from start to finish. It’s a programmatic approach to application security.
All DevOps teams should be considering security within the code as it’s being written. If you automate the way you test security against the software, you’ll be able to detect problems before it goes live.
More IT organizations are employing DevSecOps as a best practice. We can expect to see even more over the next several years.
room for improvement: automation
DevOps teams love to automate. By removing manual steps throughout the software engineering life cycle, you save time, increase security and detect any failures early.
As an IT community, we could stand to use even more automation in everything we do. One area that could especially benefit from increased automation is e-commerce. By automating the testing process of the customer journey for each project, you could improve the testing process from weeks to mere hours. Organizations could even set automated testing to take place every night, so fewer IT staff are needed to physically do the work—and be assured that everything is fresh and error-free each day.
Like DevSecOps, automated testing should be part of the code from the very beginning. Embedding it into the process will ensure a seamless experience. And constant automated testing will provide clients with more data and valuable insight into trends that would otherwise go undetected with a smaller data set. This could even allow users to make a correction before a problem even happens.
We can expect to see more automation and a smarter pipeline in the coming years.