5 DevOps Trends in 2021

What is DevOps?

DevOps employs principles and practices that emphasize communication and collaboration between the Development and the Operations teams. In a DevOps model, developers own and maintain their code from the development stage up to post-production. developers are also in charge of maintaining and fixing their code because they know their code best and can fix it as quickly as possible. The “you code it, you own it” aspect of DevOps helps to hold developers accountable for the customer experience and keep them involved in incident management. DevOps principles support collaboration, communication, and productivity while streamlining the development process.

DevOps is useful, but it’s not a magical system that will fix all of your problems, there will be challenges that arise that can’t simply be solved with a new system. These common challenges and the DevOps trends that can help solve them are outlined below.

Trends

AIOPs

Artificial intelligence for IT operations uses machine learning to make sense of and organize large datasets. In a modern, digital environment, teams are constantly inundated with data that will create an overwhelming number of constraints if relied solely on humans to analyze all of it through manual data entry. AIOps also helps to bypass human errors that occur from manual data entry, giving time back to employees who can focus on bigger, more important projects. By implementing AIOps, your organization will avoid constraints, increase efficiency, and improve revenue.

Automation

Simply put, automation helps to improve productivity for teams. A common challenge seen in DevOps environments are bottlenecks and constraints. A project or project task gets pushed to the bottom of a pileup and everything behind it is halted, causing longer wait times and project delays. Many of the struggles that cause bottlenecks relate to a lack of automation within the organization and often unplanned, manual work.

For example, social media teams can use Hootsuite to schedule and plan out posts on various social media accounts without having to switch between platforms and create content on the fly. Many departments can utilize automation in order to make their tasks quicker to understand and easier to deliver. To better understand if automation is something your teams could utilize, take a look at workflows and analyze the amount of manual work that goes into reaching completion. If there is an abundance of manual processes in place, automation may be for you.

Moving Back to SQL

SQL is a domain-specific language that enables different devices to communicate with a database. Take Pokemon Go, for example. Pokemon Go has been downloaded on thousands of android and iOS devices, these devices are coded using different languages. However, with SQL, they are still able to communicate with the same pokemon database.

Many organizations use NoSQL, which allows for the use of unstructured data. However, NoSQL is not scalable and requires custom code. Using SQL allows for different devices to use one database, and developers don’t have to write custom code. Using SQL in the development process streamlines project timelines and creates efficiencies around language-specific use cases.

Incorporating Security into DevOps

Incorporating security into DevOps is known as DevSecOps, but many argue that it should already be a part of the DevOps process.While security has many uses, specifically within the development process, it helps to spot weaknesses and vulnerabilities within a given service or application’s source code.

Though it can be an arduous process, everyone needs someone to double check their work and ensure services are secure in production. When integrated into the software development lifecycle, security can help the development be more efficient and secure.

Training Employees on Incident Response

In a DevOps model with developers now owning the applications and services they ship to production, it’s critical for developer organizations to understand and embed their builds into the incident response process. And it’s just as important for stakeholders outside of the developer organization to be involved in and understand the incident management process. With everyone enabled on response, coordination, and process—when incidents inevitably occur—teams will be able to take action immediately and orchestrate a proper response before the outage becomes customer-impacting. To learn more about being on call and incident response best practices, check out PagerDuty’s Ops Guides.

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