According to IDC, the worldwide DevOps software market is expected to reach $6.6 billion in 2022 — an increase of 40% since 2017 — with such rapid adoption explained by the overall technical progress and increased popularity of automation practices. Indeed, forward-thinking CTOs and CEOs are pouring millions of investment into collaborative, automated application development in order to streamline the product lifecycle and deliver high-quality software faster and at a lower cost.
To explain how DevOps principles can benefit your business, our in-house expert Nikita Dolya has compiled five DevOps trends to consider for your next project. But first, let’s recap what exactly “DevOps” entails.
Why is DevOps so popular in the IT community?
DevOps — a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) — is winning more and more fans for its speed, experimentation, and collaboration. It eliminates the walls dividing developers and operations teams in traditional IT companies and accelerates countless rounds of software releases. Faster deployments mean faster feedback from users, which leads to early bug detection and improved UX.
Remarkably, DevOps benefits all kinds of businesses, from startups looking to scale to enterprises striving to address new needs in an evolving landscape. If your company wants to pursue a more innovative operating model to continuously keep pace with the market, DevOps practices can help you do it — here’s five ways how.
#1: Kubernetes
Kubernetes, or k8s, is an open-source platform that eliminates manual processes involved in deploying and scaling containerized applications. Already a high quality standard for IT organizations, Kubernetes opens up a plethora of DevOps possibilities across traditional applications, hybrid- and multi-cloud implementations, and cloud-first application development.
Kubernetes speeds up the whole development process, easing the burden of configuring, deploying, managing, and monitoring containerized applications at any scale. Moreover, it’s supported by every cloud provider and is compatible with all up-to-date third-party tools.
#2: Serverless
Serverless is a must-have for literally any business. Essentially, a serverless provider allows users to write and deploy code without the hassle of worrying about the underlying infrastructure. Beyond that, a company that gets backend services from a serverless vendor pays as they go, so they’re only charged for services upon significant reduction of operational costs.
Serverless is also supported by all cloud providers — AWS Lambda, Azure functions, Google Cloud Functions — and allows developers to concentrate on the business logic of the application. And with Database on Demand, users have the unique opportunity to create and support their own databases — a task traditionally left to database administrators.
By leveraging Database on Demand, you can use various database engines (currently the Open Community version of MySQL, PostgreSQL and InfluxDB) to access regular engine updates, request backup and recovery services, and ensure service continuity in case of hardware failure.
#3: SaaS
SaaS (Software as a Service) is, in a nutshell, software that’s hosted on the cloud provider’s side. As it’s seen from the abbreviation interpreting a user or a company can order software as a service from a cloud: for example the Datadog monitoring system, error tracking on NewRalic code, CircleCI CI/CD solutions, GitlabCI, application error tracking at the Sentry code level, Auth0 authentication and authorization service. SaaS offers pay-as-you-go pricing, directly tying the cost of a SaaS product to its usage.
You can really double down on the usual SaaS benefits for your startup as the use of SaaS services speeds up the setup of a truly future-ready app with richer functionality reducing costs, time and other resources; this will perfectly position you not to worry about the development and support responsibilities of a similar solution.
#4: Overall DevOps automation
As is the DevOps motto: “Anything that can be automated, should be automated.” This allows developers to focus on writing code and developing new features instead of manually checking for errors.
If you implement automation at each stage of the software development life cycle (SDLC) using a few proven methods, you’ll be able to build and test applications in half the time. Here are two solid DevOps options:
- Manage and operate cloud-based IT infrastructure using Terraform, Terragrunt, or AWS CDK
- Leverage third-party services like Datadog, GitHub, or GitLab, Auth0, Sentry.
#5: Security
According to Cybersecurity Ventures, cybercrime damages are projected to hit $6 trillion this year, so it’s no surprise that DevSecOps (short for “development, security, and operations”) is gaining traction with every passing day.
In order to protect critical applications, you should integrate the best DevOps security practices into CI (continuous integration) and CD (continuous delivery) pipelines as early as possible. This approach allows engineers to reduce expenses and accelerate recovery speed in case a threat is detected.
Closer collaboration between security teams and DevOps teams also enables a more productive development cycle, helping to identify and resolve code vulnerabilities and operational weaknesses long before they could become a production issue.
How to make DevOps principles work for your business
Remember that DevOps is not just a set of tools for automating and accelerating delivery; first and foremost, it’s a culture that requires a company to work as a unified team, from Development and Operations team members to stakeholders and management. That said, without proper implementation, you can hardly expect to reap many benefits of the DevOps process.
As an experienced DevOps vendor, we can incorporate this methodology in line with your company’s philosophy, goals, workflows, and existing technologies. If you have a project in mind, drop us a line and we’ll help you realize your most ambitious projects!
