Mandla Mbonambi, CEO of Africonology.

There is little doubt that DevOps has evolved. It has become one of the foundational pillars of the agile organisation, delivering measurable value to the organisation across the important metrics of quality, speed of delivery, reliability and customer experiences. It has also grown to include the essential qualities of security and quality assurance, bringing these two disciplines into the DevOps fold to ensure that security is by design, and solutions are built to last.

As McKinsey points out, cross-functional teams have become increasingly powerful tools in the agile arsenal, forming part of the BizDevOps model that blends business, development, testing, and security.

The constantly changing shape of DevOps is in line with global trends and demands. Customer needs, business expectations, market demands shift and change at the speed of innovation and so organisations must have the right tools to ensure that they can keep up and stay relevant.

There are some key trends shaping DevOps as the world moves past some of the hurdles of the past two years and looks to new avenues of growth and platforms of invention.

Trend 01: Serverless compute

The movement towards serverless computing is increasing because of the significant cost benefits. It allows for organisations to also benefit from increased reliability, flexibility and speed. It also gives the DevOps the space needed to save time and money on the backend.

According to PwC, serverless computing’s ability to solve multiple software challenges, drive faster response times and optimise teams makes it a solid win for the organisation.

Trend 02: DevSecOps

This is hardly a new trend - security has been elbowing its way into DevOps for some time now - but it is gaining immense traction. Organisations are under constant threat from an increasingly sophisticated and complex security environment. They need security built into the very fabric of the business and the solutions it offers to remain compliant and to stay ahead of the threats.

DevSecOps is as it says on the tin, a smart approach to development that allows for security to collaborate as closely with development and ops as they do with one another. By adopting best practice DevSecOps processes, organisations will see a noticeable change in security hygiene and posture.

Trend 03: AIOps

Sounding similarly close to cyclops and science fiction, AIOps is the blend of artificial intelligence (AI) development and operations that introduce automation, improved problem resolution, smarter collaboration and intelligent capabilities to organisations and systems. It pulls AI, machine learning (ML), big data and analytics into a cohesive whole that can potentially transform how Dev and Ops engage with systems, platforms and one another. Gartner has predicted that AI will be used by around 40% of DevOps teams by 2023 to augment application and infrastructure monitoring.

AI continues to change how organisations operate and function and is being implemented in a wide variety of increasingly innovative solutions and toolkits. With AIOps mixed in with DevOps, teams can use the technology to automate specific processes and approaches, thereby reducing the time and admin burden for these teams and improving productivity in measurable and relevant ways.

Trend 04: DevOps will mature

In a recent report by Forrester, the research firm predicted that DevOps as a discipline would become more sophisticated and that it would grow up, grow inwards and grow the organisation. For Forrester, this evolution of DevOps marks the future fit organisation that is capable of leveraging the potential of the cloud and engaging with processes and ops in a far more agile way. This ties in with the third trend outlined above as it is AI, ML and automation that will support this growth by providing DevOps teams with the tools they need.

Mature DevOps teams are more inclined to explore fresh and innovative ways of operating so they can consistently adapt their approaches to improve time to market and reliability of the product. This is the type of team that the organisation should engage with – one that leads by design, value, and service delivery.

As digital continues to define the baseline of organisational sustainability and growth, DevOps will remain the key to unlocking every corner of a company’s potential.