Top 3 DevOps trends of 2020 in the eyes of real engineers

How many articles about DevOps trends have you read? Probably a lot? And how many of them were based on real engineers’ opinions? Probably very few. Usually, such articles are based on the gurus’ opinion or even worse – on the other articles from the Internet without any real facts or practical case studies. That’s why real benefits from such articles tend to be zero.

We are developing a deployment automation tool (we have it in pre-launch right now, by the way, so you can register here and we read A LOT of articles about DevOps. Sometimes we are desperate to find some expert opinion – but face only copy-pasted articles. So we decided to break this circle and reach out to real DevOps engineers and Software engineers like you and me who aren’t gurus but who do DevOps practice and software development on a regular or occasional basis. There were 1,405 engineers in total. We got plenty of feedback and collected the most interesting opinions in this article. We’ve chosen everyone who wrote at least one decent DevOps or Software Development related article on Medium and reached out to every single author.

Short summary before long read

We also summarised common trends and put them in this paragraph for your comfort. For the most part the responses are about:

1. Growth of DevSecOps and SRE. There is no secret about the importance of security, so these DevOps directions will continue growing. Simultaneously, DevSecOps and SRE engineers will become more in demand.
2. Serverless architecture. Our respondents say it’ll make processes more flexible and bring faster implementation for the product.
3. DevOps automation. DevOps automation was a trend in previous years and it’s still relevant today. A lot of companies prefer to automate processes and it’s a natural way of technical growth.

Concerning the tools, leaders are:

1. Kubernetes
2. Jenkins
3. Ansible
4. Docker

These tools each have different purposes, that’s why it’s hard to say what’ll be the most popular this year. We think every listed tool will have its place in the DevOps engineers’ work.We think, the more the merrier, because you can check the different opinions and formulate your own, based on your experience and different views on trends.

Opinion 1

Ronnie highlights next trends in 2020:

1. DevSecOps. How to ensure security and especially how to embed security into the pipeline.
2. Kubernetes. To easily run containerised systems.
3. Business Value Metrics. Organisations want to know what is worth to be developed. So, in my opinion, there is a shift needed from deployment pipeline thinking to value stream thinking. DevOps should allow companies to quickly develop, deliver and test features. Because you want to have quick feedback. A/B Testing, Canary releasing, analytics, etc. can help there but most important is the automation of the whole value stream.

Opinion 2

Zev chooses these trends:

1. Increasing adoption of serverless DevOps – this will bring in a faster initiation time and professional agility of processes. And newer products continue to bring in even more significant advantages.
2. Automation will become a major focus. When it comes to DevOps, automation is what we talk most about. Zero-touch automation is going to be the future of DevOps.
3. DevSecOps. Security will become a bigger concern for organizations as more and more outdated and legacy environments move to Kubernetes.

Opinion 3

Jeroen chooses next trends: Resilience Engineering (SRE + chaos engineering), Better integration of DevSecOps within the organization leading to flatter organizations and Low Code DevOps (e.g. more automation, less YAML).

Opinion 4

Mike D. Kail highlight next trends:

1. Raising awareness that DevOps is not a job title or a thing one does, it’s a cultural approach and paradigm shift.
2. Continuous Delivery metrics will start being mapped to business value and “ROI”
3. Security will continue to be “shifted left” and a core part of the SDLC.

Opinion 5

The strongest DevOps trend in 2020 will be automation. We want to do fast, frequent and efficient deploys. The second trend is “everything as code” which is complementary to automation. The third trend is a serverless approach to architecture and infrastructure. It will affect the way how we structure, deploy and monitor our applications.

Opinion 6

David’s trend includes:

1. Automation.
2. Consistency (you don’t need 4 programming stacks, 3 databases, and multi-cloud).
3. Observability (design and build apps so you can understand what they are doing).

Opinion 7

It seems to be right to mention that I’m not a DevOps Engineer, I’m an iOS Developer who just loves: DevOps, automation, and other similar things. It’s also hard for me to say what is going to be with DevOps this year, especially when I don’t see anything whether notable or new there… I still remember that awesome time when Docker, Fastlane, and others came to us. But today… It seems like nothing has been changed for a while, except maybe several things, but even they are more about people/process than technologies.

As the main DevOps trend this year I’d like to see a clear understanding that it’s necessary for developing a high-quality and modern project. That’s not the only one thing needed, but without it – building the first-class software would be almost impossible. So, I think that DevOps and Agile are those two that come hand in hand, and no doubts, those both are going to be the most interesting thing this year.

DevOps processes and workflows are going to get more complicated, they will have more stages and be easy to configure at the same time. Nowadays, projects have started to require something more than just a simple script to deal with them, and most of them have multiple configurations/deployment/build/test stages. Moreover, most of that is only possible because of DevOps. Indeed, this year, DevOps will solve more issues than it did before, as well as, issues will be more complex. And this is going to be the second important trend.

As the last… It doesn’t matter how many years have passed since DevOps came to us. Or maybe, it’s only actual for me, but there is still the same issue which I saw since the very beginning: there are a pretty small amount of people who have a strong understanding of DevOps meaning and how it can change their life/work. The sadness is what many people still think that a few hours to set up all they need, that can keep thousands of hours – isn’t worth it… even if it saves hundreds of hours later. Whatsoever, I see, DevOps keeps getting more and more attention, and I hope this will be different soon. Perhaps, I should put this in the first place, but this place seems to be right: DevOps itself is going to be the most popular thing this year.

Opinion 8

Kubernetes will continue to be a top DevOps trend in 2020. Other top trends, in my opinion, will be server-less and distributing load by making use of edge computing.

Opinion 9

I choose Kubernetes, Serverless and Microservices as DevOps trends for 2020.

Opinion 10

Ricardo’s trends:

1. Hybrid Cloud CI/CD solutions: many companies (chiefly the biggest ones) avoid depending on single cloud providers to minimize vendor-specific risks and reduce costs. At the same time, they’re not keen to spend money on building particular pipelines for each of the cloud providers they use. In this sense, I believe CI/CD tools designed as a high-level abstraction of vendor-specific products have a chance to succeed. For example, what about deploying to Google Cloud Functions or AWS Lambda transparently? I mean, no matter the cloud provider you chase, you might count on a tool that would automatically deploy a serverless application for you.
2. Git-to-Cloud seamless integration: DevOps disciplines rely on code, day-after-day more code is managed by Git, and modern apps are deployed in the cloud. This makes me believe integration between Cloud and Git providers will become easier and broader as time goes by. DevOps-enabled teams still have to write to code to make some integrations happen, but I believe standard Git-to-Cloud solutions will become more and more common, saving teams hours of setup and headaches.
3. AI-enhanced Code Review: being more specific to coding, I see Code Review as one of the most important tasks. Good Code Review is usually time-consuming, requires energy and patience from involved parts, and modern tools might do more than presenting changes side-by-side with distinct highlighted colors. At the end of the day, the process is still error-prone. I believe Code Review tools will be enhanced to leverage AI capabilities, starting with automatic reviews of simple/regular changes, and improved as they learn from development teams.

Opinion 11

The first trend is Kubernetes. Kubernetes continues to increase in importance as its capabilities become more important. When used with just basic configuration it already provides self-healing and replication features. But it when used properly it can provide infrastructure for serving massive applications to millions of users.

Second trend – microservices. Applications have bugs and break, even with lots of automated and manual testing. But you don’t want your frontend to be unreachable when there’s a null pointer in your backend. Therefore splitting your application into (reasonably small) parts is the smart thing to do in 2020. Also, scalability improves!Third trend – DevOps as a Service: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZbZ8YCfqhg As explained in the presentation I linked, DevOps today is fragmented. For example Gitea as VCS hoster, Jenkins as build server, Kubernetes to manage containers. This makes the process from code being checked into git to being deployed onto servers somewhat incomprehensible. Centralizing this process with tools like Jenkins X or GitLab CI is going to become increasingly important.

Why no AWS?AWS matters a lot in the world right now, but for companies in the EU, being compliant with the GDPR and using AWS at the same time is pretty much an impossibility right now.

Opinion 12

Aidan chooses these trends:

1. Build-in security and privacy. It’s not that it should be easy… it’s that it should be the default.
2. Do less. Stop running your own clusters, stop hosting your own databases you need to upgrade, stop hardening virtual machines – just use higher-level platforms that do all of that for you and deliver it in smaller and smaller chunks.
3. Be user-centered. We think of user/human-centered design as being about end-user facing products, but internals users are humans too. Do UX research and solve the problems your users actually have.

Opinion 13

In my opinion, the first trend is PaaS (e.g. Heroku) becoming more popular among startups with their backend having no requirement of high load and with no resources available to hire DevOps Engineer because PaaS is easier than, for instance, deploying Kubernetes cluster.

The second trend, I believe, is that many many cloud software solutions are becoming already configured and/or built out of a box, e.g. bitnami – that makes deployment maybe not that easy as using Heroku solutions, but easier than building by yourself, though, some little configuration is still required.

The third trend is still Kubernetes and all the features it provides. There’re more and more tools appearing, such as helm.sh, for instance, making a life of a DevOps or a Backend engineer easier.

Opinion 14

Clement thinks that trends of 2020 are Containerization (Docker + Kubernetes especially), Microservices and Distributed Tracing to handle Fan Out problems (for large applications running at scale).

Opinion 15

I select the next three trends:

1. Customizability on operation arrangements and server orchestration.
2. Stability on third-party plugins.
3. The language used for DevOps would lean on newborns such as Golang Vlang etc.

Opinion 16

In my opinion Kubernetes, Docker and Jenkins are the most trending tools in this year.

Opinion 17

Parthiban highlights that in this year DevOps engineers will work predominantly with Kubernetes, Ansible and ELK.

Opinion 18

I think the most popular trend in 2020 are Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code and Security as a service.

Opinion 19

Derrick chooses for 2020 next trends:

1. Continuous Integration
2. Using CDNs such as Netlify to make building fast
3. Continuous deployment.

Opinion 20

SeungHun thinks we’ll work with there trends: one person manages it all, Affordability and Shorter Latency.

Opinion 21

Data Science integration with DevOps, CI/CD not just for software but for distributed and fragmented IoT applications, A new job profile: DevOps engineer with expertise in Security or vice versa.

Opinion 22

In my opinion in 2020 will lead Automation, Serverless Architect and DevOps Assembly Lines.

Opinion 23

Idrees thinks the first trend is Kubernetes (learn and embrace it), the second is Golang and third is Distributed systems.

Opinion 24

Sai Vittal B choose next trends:

1. Automation, CI and CD
2. Security setting up
3. Increased adaptation of Kubernetes.

Opinion 25

Pier picks these trends:

1. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for task automation.
2. Intellectual Property Protection and security will become more and more important (eg. prevent data breaches).
3. Kubernetes adoption will continue to increase.

Opinion 26

In Omer’s opinion we’ll work a lot with DevSecOps, Service Mesh and GitOps.

Opinion 27

My 3 trends are:Kubernetes. Kubernetes is eating the world of cloud and infrastructure. Companies like Pivotal and VMWare are recreating their core products around k8s due to its popularity, resiliency, and API driven approach. Technology institutions are using k8s as an abstraction layer across cloud providers to prevent vendor lock-in. K8s is here to stay.GitOps. Git as been adopted across the board as the primary source of version control. This allows tools like flux and argo to do the heavy lifting of CI/CD once the source code hits the master branch. Pipelines are such a standard in 2020 that it makes them more of a chore which is why we’ll see the GitOps pull model continue to grow vs the traditional pipeline push model.Cloud. More and more companies are migrating to the cloud to get to market faster by using off the shelf integrations. AWS revenue alone is up 34% just from a year ago. It’s clear we’ll continue to see more cloud growth in 2020.

Opinion 28

I want to highlight the next three trends:

1. GitOps. Infrastructure as code was always a better way but GitOps takes it to the next level by executing the changes made in version control to reflect the actual state of the infra.
2. Volume Snapshots. Kubernetes is gearing up to build this abstraction of creating volume snapshots across different cloud providers.
3. Hashicorp Vault. More flexible secrets management store.

Opinion 29

The main DevOps trends in the current year are MLOps, DevSecOps and Serverless Architecture Migration.

Opinion 30

Segun highlights next DevOps trends in 2020:

1. automation of AI and data science
2. cloud computing
3. deep understanding of blockchain technology and how to make good use of it.

Opinion 31

Renato thinks that key trends of this year are Azure DevOps, Kubernetes and Jetbrains Space.

Opinion 32

Trends 2020, in my opinion, are DevOps automation, Focus on Continuous Delivery and Social collaboration.

Opinion 33

I think in 2020 understanding in DevOps will growth and two other trends are DevOps&Service Mesh and DevOps Assembly Lines.

Opinion 34

I think that the most important trends in 2020 are DevSecOps, Serverless and Domain-Driven Design.

Opinion 35

Moses highlights next 2020 trends – Kubernetes, Helm, Jenkins.

Opinion 36

Madeesha thinks that in 2020 we’ll face next trends: Containerization, Everything as code and Automation.

Opinion 37

Elton choose next trends:

1. A greater integration between DevOps and data. Teams will need better ways to manage big chunks of data to perform tests and new features.
2. An increase of use of Machine Learning to automate tasks and to find trends related to performance of the teams and products
3. DevSecOps will be the new standard, instead of just DevOps

Opinion 38

1. Serverless and PaaS. For vast majority of companies, there’s no reason to managing your own infrastructure anymore. While Kubernetes and Docker swarm have abstracted managing an infrastructure, the real ideal abstraction are services like Heroku or Google App Engine. Cloudflare or Fastly instead of rolling your own WAF. The results are reduction in staffing overhead, easier to achieve compliances like SOC2, and more focus on building business logic.
2. Cloud CI and CD. No more massive “QA Environments”. Use pipelines/review apps/ad hoc qa environments so you can produce deliverable iterations of your product faster and more often. So many more benefits to this than to traditional development processes.
3. Development in the cloud. As latency improves more engineers will be doing development on cloud based IDEs, or at minimum using shim VMs to do actual development instead of their own laptops. Results will be improved security and easier to keep dev environments more consistent.

Opinion 39

For me, first, to be a cloud expert, getting around with all the cloud providers, optimizing their usage, performance, scalability and, of course, decreasing the bill to be paid.Also, this will help in the job of architect microservices and software containers, reducing downtime with redundancy.Second, to create tools that improve and help development, automatizing everything that keeps the best standards of the code, even before his integration and code review.Finally, but not the least, to know how to code, as this will improve the communication with development teams, and give insight about what are their real needs.

Opinion 40

Paul thinks the main trends in 2020 will be serverless, still cloud, and still CI/CD.

Opinion 41

Fedir highlights next trends in this year – Kubernetes, Serverless architecture, Automation.

Opinion 42

Vaibhav choose these three trends – Service Mesh, Kubernetes CI/CD, Container as a Service.

Opinion 43

Sarut highlights as trends AI and DevOps, Big Data and Microservices.

Opinion 44

Ciro thinks DevOps trends to nail in 2020 are Governance, CI/CD and Multi-cloud.

Opinion 45

1. Skillset: The demand in the market is growing, prepare your Full Stack Engineers to also be DevOps. You can’t have a team of developers without a clue where/how their software will run in the cloud.
2. I see reusable microservices, stateless apps, services orchestration as the future.
3. Learn how to use DevOps metrics, this will allow to know/trace/improve your software from top to toe.

Conclusion

We’ve finished! It’s cool if you’ve read to this point. We hope you have enjoyed the different opinions and deployment automation tools, and we want to thank you by giving you a discount on the product we have worked tirelessly to create. Please register and receive your gift.We’ll update this article as new comments arrive, so remember to check back later. Please, share with us your favorite opinion? What trend do you like? What can you add? The truth is born in argument, so maybe we’ll add some new opinions from comments;)
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