6 DevOps Trends to Watch in 2019

DevOps has evolved over the last few years, but it’s still in the early part of its journey. In the next five years, the global DevOps market is expected to reach $12.85 billion. Accelerated growth will kick off in 2019 when the market will begin to experience an 18.6 percent CAGR through to 2025.¹

At Flexagon, we’re excited for how DevOps has evolved and grown to this point, but we’re even more excited about where we see the field heading. As we look ahead to the new year, we’ve rounded out the six trends that will drive DevOps growth and shape its future.

1. There Will Be a Significant Ramp Up In Continuous Delivery and Tools That Support CD Pipelines

Continuous integration (CI) was the buzzword in 2018 and earlier years. But businesses and IT teams have been widening their viewpoints for several years to include continuous delivery (CD). Now, it’s no longer continuous integration vs. continuous delivery, the focus is squarely on continuous delivery. CI is still being discussed, but it’s spoken of as what it is – an integral part of continuous delivery.

As we move in 2019, DevOps will continue to take a more inclusive approach to software development with a large ramp up in continuous delivery. To support this shift, we’ll see more companies adopting tools that can handle multiple parts of the process, including those that span the build, deploy and release stages of the software delivery lifecycle. Moving forward, DevOps tools will be more and more likely to enable and focus on improving CI/CD pipelines.

2. Kubernetes and Containers Adoption will Continue to Increase

The popularity of containers will reach an all-time high in 2019 as DevOps becomes more complex and widespread. As a result, we’ll see IT teams turning to container technology and Kubernetes as their orchestration tool of choice. Growing in popularity over the last four years, Kubernetes has secured its dominance now that it is backed by an ecosystem that spans a wide variety of platforms, vendors, and customers.

3. We’ll Start to See More Embedded Security

With the growing number of security breaches and the long-lasting impacts to a company’s value, cybersecurity is quickly becoming a business imperative. Building off the increased focus in 2018, DevOps will more rapidly incorporate security. The shift to DevSecOps will encourage even greater collaboration in software development within enterprises. However, it will also require teams to come together to develop processes that will ensure the process remains efficient, seamless and effective.

4. Businesses and Tools Will Focus on Serverless

With their finger on the pulse of optimization, IT professionals are rapidly leveraging serverless computing and functions. Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) will become a hot commodity in 2019, enabling faster startup times, better resource utilization, and process management – benefits that will be further enhanced with DevOps software.

5. We’ll See More Widespread Enterprise DevOps Adoption

A good portion of the expected double-digit growth for DevOps starting in 2019 will be driven by rising enterprise adoption rates. This includes enterprise tools that companies will purchase, which must have the functionality and flexibility to be customized to meet their specific needs. However, the benefits DevOps is bringing to IT, including delivering higher quality software to market faster, will likely spur executives to leverage DevOps principles within other enterprise functions.

6. IT Teams will Improve Visibility into Processes

As more enterprises leverage DevOps, they’ll also look for ways to increase visibility into processes and measure its impact. Using governance features in DevOps tools along with automated tracking and reporting on a blend of metrics, companies can gain a clear line of sight into who makes what changes, when, and what permissions or approvals are needed at each stage.

In addition, feedback loops will be shortened and allow more rapid improvements to the business processes which the applications support. Such transparency will enable executives to assess what’s working with tools and processes and identify areas that need to be adjusted or improved.

DevOps Culture Will Spread in 2019

DevOps has always been more than a technology. It’s a mindset and a culture that organizations adopt by bringing traditionally disconnected components of software development and delivery together.

The DevOps trends shaping 2019 will see DevOps come closer to its full potential, providing more functionality and greater efficiency. These are far from the only trends we’ll see, however. At Flexagon, we’re watching the increasing popularity of agentless, microservices architecture, and application release automation as well.

For businesses already adopting DevOps, or considering adopting DevOps, it’s essential to keep up with these and other trends, as well as how they affect your technology and systems. By staying up to date with the latest trends and technology, you set your business up to get the greatest benefit from DevOps and the tools you integrate into your processes.