The article, "2025 DevOps Trends: What Will Change and What Won’t" by Derek Ashmore, provides a comprehensive forecast of the DevOps landscape in the year 2025. The main focus of the article is to highlight emerging DevOps trends worth watching in the new year, alongside ongoing trends that will continue to influence the domain. The author adopts both a forward-thinking approach by exploring novel concepts and a retrospective view by acknowledging enduring practices.
Emerging DevOps Trends
GitOps: Centralizing Infrastructure Management
One of the foremost emerging trends discussed is GitOps. GitOps leverages Git repositories as the central source of truth for managing infrastructure and application configurations. By doing so, it offers several advantages such as centralized visibility into IT resources, automated provisioning, and streamlined automated testing. Although GitOps has been present since 2016, its adoption has only significantly picked up pace recently. The author predicts that GitOps will see continued growth in 2025 as more organizations realize its value.
Organizations are keen on adopting GitOps because it fundamentally enhances efficiency and standardization. By utilizing Git as a single source of truth, teams can ensure that configurations are consistent and version-controlled, reducing the risk of human error. Automation plays a central role in this trend, allowing for the seamless implementation of changes and the rapid rollback to previous versions if issues arise. The expected continuous growth of GitOps in 2025 signifies a move towards more stable and manageable infrastructures, providing a firm foundation for complex deployment processes.
Platform Engineering: Accelerating Application Development
Platform engineering is another trend highlighted in the article. This practice involves providing developers with preconfigured tools and services to facilitate application development. The goal is to offer developers a complete set of resources, akin to giving them a car instead of just car parts. Platform engineering is not entirely new, but it is expected to gain more traction as companies seek to accelerate their application development processes.
Providing a comprehensive platform enables developers to bypass the initial setup phase, allowing them to focus directly on coding and problem-solving. This acceleration is particularly significant for organizations aiming to reduce time-to-market for new applications. Furthermore, the practice of platform engineering ensures that all development tools and services are fully integrated and optimized for compatibility, which can significantly enhance productivity and collaboration among development teams. The trend’s anticipated growth reflects the industry’s continuous push towards maximizing development efficiency and output.
Infrastructure Static Code Analysis: Enhancing Security
With the increasing pace of development, ensuring security becomes paramount. Infrastructure static code analysis emerges as a crucial practice to address this need. This method involves the automated and scalable detection of security risks early in the development lifecycle. It helps mitigate potential vulnerabilities, thereby enhancing the overall security posture of applications.
This approach provides a proactive layer of security checks that can identify issues before they evolve into critical vulnerabilities within live environments. By integrating static code analysis tools into the DevOps pipeline, organizations can enforce security best practices from the outset, catching coding anomalies and potential exploits in real-time. Scalability is a significant advantage, allowing these tools to handle vast amounts of code without compromising speed or reliability. As security threats continue to evolve, the importance and adoption of infrastructure static code analysis are expected to surge, thereby safeguarding applications through vigilant and continuous monitoring.
AIOps: Supporting AI Tool Development
The article also delves into AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations), which refers to the IT services necessary to support AI tool development, testing, and deployment. As enterprises move from merely discussing AI to actual implementation, the need for robust operational practices to support mature AI products becomes evident. Hence, AIOps is expected to become a dominant trend in 2025.
As AI projects grow in complexity, the need for AIOps to manage and optimize these deployments cannot be overstated. The integration of AI into operational workflows requires a structured and well-maintained IT environment where data pipelines are optimized, and machine learning models are trained and deployed without hitches. AIOps enable continuous monitoring, real-time analytics, and automated problem resolution, facilitating a seamless AI lifecycle management. The expected prominence of AIOps in 2025 highlights the industry’s acknowledgment of the critical role robust IT operations play in the success of AI-driven initiatives.
Enduring DevOps Trends
Policy-Based Governance: Managing IT Resources
Policy-based governance is a well-established practice where IT resources are managed through defined rules encoded in policies. These rules are then used to automatically assess compliance and security. This practice has been particularly prevalent among organizations using cloud services, and as IT environments grow more complex, its importance will only increase.
The application of policy-based governance simplifies the management of IT resources by instilling an automated, rule-based framework. Such governance ensures that resources consistently adhere to organizational standards and regulatory compliance requirements. Automating these controls not only reduces the likelihood of human error but also accelerates the identification and resolution of non-compliant resources. As cloud environments continue to expand in scale and complexity, maintaining stringent control through policy-based governance will be critical in upholding security standards and operational efficiency.
Software as a Service (SaaS): Reducing Maintenance Burden
Software as a Service (SaaS) is another enduring trend. SaaS became popular due to its ability to lessen the maintenance burden on DevOps teams by externalizing the management of applications and their underlying infrastructure. The author foresees SaaS continuing to be the preferred model for deploying commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS), with more organizations likely to adopt SaaS solutions in place of self-deployed and managed applications.
The shift towards SaaS reflects a strategic move to alleviate the internal workload and allocate resources more effectively. By leveraging SaaS, organizations can benefit from regular updates, robust security measures, and minimal downtime, all managed by the service provider. This transition allows DevOps teams to focus on core activities such as development and innovation, rather than routine maintenance. As integrated SaaS solutions deliver consistent performance and scalability, their adoption as a primary model for software deployment is projected to sustain significant growth.
Cloud Migration: Eliminating Physical Infrastructure Management
Cloud migration remains a crucial trend, reflecting the persistent value of the cloud in allowing organizations to eliminate the need for physical infrastructure management. The shift towards an IT strategy where nearly everything is cloud-based is expected to continue, driven by the operational efficiencies and scalability benefits provided by the cloud.
Migrating to the cloud offers numerous advantages, including improved flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency compared to maintaining on-premises infrastructure. Organizations can dynamically scale compute resources to meet demand, pay only for what they use, and capitalize on the cloud provider’s extensive infrastructure and security capabilities. As businesses seek to enhance their agility and reduce capital expenditures, embracing cloud migration as a cornerstone of their IT strategy will remain a prevalent trend in 2025. The ongoing focus on cloud adoption reflects the broader industry movement towards resource optimization and operational excellence.
Serverless Computing: Simplifying Application Deployment
Serverless computing represents a specific type of cloud service that underscores the value proposition of the cloud. With serverless, DevOps engineers are relieved not only from managing physical servers but also from provisioning or monitoring any operating system environment. They can simply deploy applications as serverless functions. While serverless may not suit all applications, the trend is anticipated to see increased adoption in appropriate use cases.
The appeal of serverless architecture lies in its ability to offload infrastructure management tasks to the cloud provider, allowing development teams to concentrate on writing code and iterating on features. This model eliminates concerns related to server provisioning and scaling, as the cloud provider handles these details automatically based on demand. Serverless computing is especially beneficial for microservices and event-driven applications, enabling rapid deployment and cost-effective resource usage. As organizations continue to explore ways to streamline operations and optimize resource allocation, the adoption of serverless computing for suitable applications is expected to grow significantly.
Declining DevOps Practices
Decreasing Reliance on Virtual Machines (VMs)
The article also anticipates a decline in certain longstanding DevOps practices. The reliance on virtual machines (VMs) is expected to wane as DevOps teams opt for serverless options, which do not require any server environment maintenance. This shift is driven by the desire for more efficient and scalable solutions that reduce the overhead associated with managing VMs.
The traditional approach of using VMs, though effective in its time, is being outpaced by more agile and cost-effective alternatives. Virtual machines require significant resources for provisioning, maintenance, and scaling, which can slow down development cycles and increase operational overhead. As serverless and containerization technologies mature, organizations are likely to pivot away from VMs to these newer, more streamlined methodologies. This transition allows for faster deployment times, improved resource utilization, and reduced infrastructure management complexity, setting the stage for a future where VMs play a diminishing role in DevOps environments.
Reduced Use of Configuration Management Tools
In his article, "2025 DevOps Trends: What Will Change and What Won’t," Derek Ashmore delves into the projected future of the DevOps landscape by 2025. Ashmore’s main aim is identifying and discussing emerging DevOps trends that should be on our radar in the coming year. He highlights new and innovative trends while also giving nods to the enduring practices that will still hold significance. By taking this dual approach, Ashmore offers a balanced perspective, combining a forward-looking view of upcoming concepts with a retrospective acknowledgment of the foundational practices that continue to shape the field. The article serves as a crucial guide, emphasizing both upcoming innovations and enduring trends that will remain pivotal for DevOps professionals. Whether you’re keen on understanding the new dynamics or appreciating the lasting principles, Ashmore’s insights bring clarity and foresight into what to expect from DevOps in 2025. It’s a valuable read for anyone involved in this evolving sector, ensuring they stay informed and prepared for the future.