Craving to know what 2020 has in stock for your company? This is going to be a very juicy year, with so many breathtaking trends. This is going to be especially bright for DevOps fans, or those who are ready to untap DevOps potential of their businesses. See why below.

Many claim that DevOps has become mainstream for the industry. However, we’re pretty confident that that’s not the case, as DevOps adoption, according to Statista, was only 17 percent in 2018. Nevertheless, we do want DevOps to become mainstream, that’s why we’ve prepared an article on the hottest DevOps trends 2020 so that you get inspired to continue your DevOps journey with renewed energy or give it a start, finally. The article shares some beneficial insights for the experienced innovators and also features the trend risks which DevOps newbies may find very useful. So, it will fit both DevOps old dogs as well as newbies. Enjoy!

Trend #1. Automation

It seems that there’s no a DevOps pillar as vital as automation, besides human potential, of course.

Automation is becoming more sophisticated with each coming year. So, back at the dawn of the coding era, we started from an irksome and time-consuming coding and manual-testing. In three decades, these evolve into open-source frameworks and test automation. In 2020, software is almost never written from scratch, while TA ensures an inspiring 85% test coverage and 40% timelines reduction. Pure manual practices are becoming a thing of the past, so immense automation capabilities that DevOps allows in 2020 are only natural. See an ultimate list of the open-source DevOps tools available today and have no doubts that a zero-click human intervention is closer than you might’ve ever imagined.

Watch out for the trend risks!

Automation is great, as long as it runs smoothly. If a TA engineer automates a bug, this slip may cost a company a screwed deploy and incur high fixing costs. Same story in DevOps. Remember to cultivate a hustle-free culture of responsible coding in your company, which brings us back to human resources as a basis of a successful DevOps implementation.

Trend #2. DevSecOps

Another important piece of DevOps news, is that 2020 will cultivate much interest into improving security. With microservices and serverless gaining incredible weight in the industry, the apps building is becoming more flexible, yet new security challenges appear due to structural characteristics of the cloud-native apps.

Take APIs as an example of a security challenge brought about by the adoption of serverless architecture on top of microservices, where independent software pieces interact through numerous APIs. This solution is going to be more risky in time, as, according to Gartner, in 2022 APIs will be the key source of data breaches. That is why DevOps community is choosing to react proactively and puts APIs security on their priorities list, along with authentication, vulnerabilities of third-party services, etc.

Watch out for the trend risks!

Not for nothing was a separate term - DevSecOps - coined, which basically means that conventional security measures don’t work for DevOps. In 2019, many DevOps projects failed due to security reasons. So, be ready to invest immensely into security when launching your first DevOps endeavor!

Trend #3. Serverless

“Deploying containerized services on serverless architectures and orchestrating those services with Kubernetes fits into existing DevOps practices,” – O’Reilly team states in their 2019 survey on serverless. Thus, if you’re looking for a perfect team to manage your serverless implementations, consider DevOps as a top option. This links DevOps success in 2020 directly to the serverlsess success. What are the predictions as regards serverless?

According to the respondents of the above survey, serverless is most likely to be gaining wider audience in 2020 as it:

• Reduces operational costs(reported by 60% of the participants)
• Ensures automatic scalingwith demand (stated by 58%)
• Enables trouble-free server maintenanceprovided by the cloud vendor (a huge plus for 55%)
• Cuts back on software development costs (reported by 32% of the respondents)
• Increases developer efficiencyto drive business value (mentioned by 30%).

Moreover, further acceptance of serverless is backed by the promising statistics. Already in 2019 AWS Lambda was among the top ten most used services on AWS, and over a one-third of companies use Lambda in their production applications (Source).

Watch out for the trend risks!

To master serverless needs impressive training. As the authors of the above mentioned survey indicate, it is a major challenge among the serverless adopters ( 44%). "That makes sense: with serverless being relatively young, formal training is difficult to find, specific documentation must be generated, and case studies to learn from—while growing—are harder to come by," they say.

One more crucial drawback (and a stumbling block for many) is still vendor lock-in reported by 30% of the survey participants. At the same time, numerous CTOs confirm the concerns on the subject of vendor lock-in. So far, as the technology is pretty young, cloud providers had too little time (or desire or whatever) to settle the compatibility issues. So, yes, for the time being, this is going to pose certain difficulties for the serverless adopters.

Trend #4. Kubernetes

Kubernetes is a great solution for container management. However, Kubernetes itself is not so great to manage. Then what makes it a 2020 hit?

As it allows working containerization miracles, cloud providers couldn’t but fix what Google oversaw when creating Kubernetes. By 2020, we already see tons of managed services that help companies get the most of Kubernetes. Hence, if you’ve gone down the DevOps path and chose to build your apps using microservices and containers, 2020 will be an almost trouble-free year for you. Consequently, as Kubernetes is getting more user-friendly, it adoption rates are growing.

Furthermore, with a rise of data science that will carry on into 2020, Kubernetes adoption will continue, for it allows huge capabilities for data scientists.

Watch out for the trend risks!

Despite being a really cool alternative, Kubernetes is still a relatively complex tool which has its disadvantages. For example, it won’t be a perfect fit for a small app as it was initially designed to make life easier for big guys managing big apps.

Besides, managed services are a good thing, but you definitely need a Kubernetes master to handle it all. However, Kubernetes expert may actually cost you a pool of talents, to be honest. Get ready to say bye-bye for $150,000 for such a talent, which is exactly how much the annual salary of a Kubernetes expert is.

Conclusion

Oh, yeah, this is going to be a hot, stunning year for the DevOps community with a lot of bright opportunities and mesmerizing results. Ultimate automation, DevSecOps, Serverless, Kubernetes – sounds amazing, doesn’t it? Don’t miss a chance to get the most of this year if you’re a long-time DevOps player.

Although, if you’re willing to try DevOps out for the first time in 2020 but feels a little freaked out, don’t let that feeling take you aback! The listed above are sophisticated pieces of technology that you can make great use of this year. Yap, there are some risks, mastering DevOps still needs some sweating, but it’s definitely worth it at the end of the day.

Need some help launching your first DevOps endeavor or want to improve your existing practices? Contact our Support team for more on our first-hand experience or visit our website.