6 DevOps Trends to Watch Out For in 2023

2022 saw a significant upsurge in the adoption of continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), build automation, and infrastructure as a code. As global organizations continue to strengthen and expand their DevOps and cloud journeys, we are witnessing a robust evolutionary paradigm on a worldwide scale — one that could indeed drive revolutionary transformations of the worldwide DevOps ecosystem.

Leveraging its core engineering expertise and multi-vertical capabilities, the team at LTTS is monitoring these emerging trends to help unlock value for global customers across key industry segments and geographies.

We are witnessing an enhanced focus on continuous integration and build automation across embedded systems development, along with a growing momentum around CI/CD, especially in Healthcare applications, Transportation, and Industrial products. As global cybersecurity and compliance concerns continue to persist, we are also noting the rise of infrastructure as a code and GitOps with cloud-native deployments as the preferred solution. DevOps tools standardization, and cloud-enabled DevOps services, and cultural transformations are some of the other major developments to watch out for.

Let us review of some of these emerging trends to prepare better for the way ahead in 2023.

• DevOps tools standardization — Several organizations are looking to standardize their DevOps tools, incorporated into their IT landscape either due to the merger of two entities or from poor planning outcomes while adopting DevOps practices in their development paradigm. Pipelines in Azure DevOps, Jenkins, various security tools, and hardcoded tool integrations are becoming a bottleneck in the process and are fast emerging as yet another silo in the development cycle. This is slowing down the development and scalability of the pipeline’s success.
  In my experience, customers are already starting to complain about poor SDO (Software Delivery and Operations) performance as seven hours of CI/CD, with as high as a 45–60 percent decline in stability rate (change fail rates and mean time to restore) — a scenario which can only be addressed through focused standardization initiatives.
• Migration of on-prem pipelines to the cloud — A surge in the migration of Kubernetes-powered cloud infrastructure for pipelines will help drive scalability in 2023. Organizations that have solved their earlier DevOps issues with on-prem deployments will continue to be challenged by this emerging trend and will be called upon to redesign their strategy for enhancing pipeline availability and scalability.
• GitOps with Terraform and Git — GitOps has taken over the modern DevOps practice by storm. There are many IaC tools in the market, but Terraform has gained popularity everywhere in the organization we have worked with because of its ability to deliver configuration management tools like Ansible. GitOps demonstrates complete end-to-end flow that constructs Terraform plans, Git, CI/CD tools like GitHub Actions, and a cloud platform. By automating the entire process, from development commit to setting up infrastructure for testing and production deployment, it is an easy choice for organizations to increase efficiency in their DevOps implementation paradigms.
• Increase in Kubernetes in deployment — The King of Container orchestration will continue to increase in deployment patterns. We will also see the organization show up in Microservices architecture and cloud adoption, making it the go-to choice for Kubernetes. As an open-source container orchestration system that helps, deploy, scale, and load-balancing container applications, many more organizations will adopt Kubernetes due to its strong support from hyper-scalers in 2023.
• Internal DevOps Platforms — Many organizations are looking for an internal DevOps platform that streamlines the development process. These platforms are designed to support software development for embedded systems and enterprise applications. From concept to completion, the internal DevOps platform will provide ready-to-use and plugin the required tools with minimal effort for creating a streamlined CI/CD Pipeline. What we need to remember here is that one of the biggest challenges in embedded systems is the need for meeting compliance checks per various international standards by the industry type. By automating these checks, our internal DevOps platform can help streamline development pathways and increase software delivery without compromising on quality, speed, and reliability.
• Site Reliability Engineering / Observability — We are also observing significant growth in site reliability engineering(SRE) and obeservability with several customers looking to leverage this in their technology adoiption paradigms. While augmenting observability is a boon, it is also helping uncover operational challenges, helping drive exponential growth for SRE and observability across companies and industries that are in the midst of this transition. Our Internal DevOps Platform is designed to include observability and provide proactive site reliability practices.
  At this stage, you might be wondering if I have missed out on the aspect of automating security. While it may seem that this has not been called out aloud, it is present as an integral part of the overall narrative, given its growing importance in driving DevOps practices. And as we are aware, tools like GitHub that provide automated security checks are proving to be a boon for the global developer community.

Navigating 2023: Making it Count

As a number of DevOps tools and services continue to become popular, it often becomes increasingly difficult to make the right choices at an enterprise level in terms of tool selection. We need to know which tools are available in the market, undertake an appropriate cost-benefit analysis, and unlock value across the chain by leveraging the most appropriate solutions. The trends we mentioned here, therefore, reflect our understanding of what global customers are looking for in 2023.

DevOps is evolving and we need to evolve alongside — only then we can make 2023 count for its worth and achieve our goals for the new year.