Top 18 DevOps Trends in 2022 and Beyond

Over the years, many tech giants have successfully adopted DevOps into their ecosystem, and the key to success is knowing and implementing the latest DevOps Trends of that particular era. This article helps you understand the DevOps trends that will shape the industry and may become the founding stone of your DevOps implementation in 2022 and beyond.

1. GitOps: A framework to implement DevOps best practices.

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GitOps is one of the latest DevOps trends added to the DevOps workflow. It helps automate and control infrastructure. It’s a Kubernetes-based paradigm that enables developers and IT operation managers to use Git for merging and deploying various applications. GitOps considers all the DevOps best practices, such as version control, collaboration, compliance, and CI/CD, and applies them to infrastructure automation. In addition, it also focuses on incremental releases and continuous delivery to build, test, and deploy software quickly and efficiently.

2. AIOps/MLOps: Automating IT operations and processes.

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AIOps and MLOps are two of the DevOps market trends, with the prediction of it becoming a $40.91 billiont entity by 2026. Optimizing DevOps processes is essential to obtain the benefits of quick-release and high quality, where AIOps and MLOps have a significant role to play. While AIOps can help you automate IT operations and processes, MLOps standardizes the ML system development. So, with AIOps, you can identify the root cause of any problem hampering productivity; MLOps can help you streamline processes and increase productivity.

3. DevSecOps: Enforcing security, observability, and governance in DevOps.

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Security has always been a significant concern in the digital world. DevSecOps integrates the best practices in the DevOps lifecycle, emphasizing security, observability, and governance. It states that security should follow a shift-left approach and not be an afterthought. The current DevSecOps trends tell us that 50% of enterprises run the SAST test, 40% run DAST, and 50% scan containers and dependencies.

4. FinOps: Optimizing cloud spending by bringing financial accountability.

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FinOps is one of the DevOps industry trends that describes the best practices for optimizing cloud spending to increase profit margins for the company. It brings financial accountability to cloud expenditures by collaborating with various teams to strike a balance between speed, cost, and quality. As of 2022, 43% of CTOs, 24% of CIOs, and 17% of CFOs collaborate with the FinOps team in an enterprise-level organization.

5. DataOps: Accelerating development by optimizing the data pipeline.

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DataOps is a set of technical practices, workflows, cultural norms, and architectural patterns that aim to bring faster release, high-quality data, collaboration, and monitoring. All these are significant DevOps features, so there is no surprise that 89% of firms will utilize DataOps in the upcoming years. DataOps aligns people, processes, and technology to enable agile and secure data management. DevOps and DataOps accelerate development, but DevOps focuses more on delivery, while DataOps focuses more on data pipeline integration.

6. Chaos engineering: Building resilient software systems by reducing their unpredictability.

Phases of Chaos Engineering

Chaos engineering is a method of testing the reliability of the software by deliberately introducing failure or faulty scenarios, also known as creating chaos. Causing these random disruptions will force applications to behave differently, and they might break under immense pressure. Engineers can then analyze and identify the root cause of problems and treat them before production deployment. Continuous testing, improvement, and reliability are pillars of DevOps, and chaos engineering aims to facilitate that aspect. Gartner predicts that almost 40% of DevOps firms will implement chaos engineering by 2023.

7. Site reliability engineering (SRE): Accelerating software delivery by ensuring reliability.

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Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a software engineering approach to IT operations where you use software tools to manage systems, solve problems, and automate operations tasks. The question is, what does DevOps do to SRE? SRE helps you to create scalable and highly reliable software systems. That’s why SRE is one of the most demanding LinkedIn jobs of 2022, shaping the IT industry.

8. Hybrid deployment: Reducing infrastructure cost and time-to-market.

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Hybrid deployment combines the power of on-premise infrastructure with cloud computing resources. The significant benefit of this approach is that you don’t have to worry about full-fledged cloud migration; you just need to augment on-premise resources and create an alternate path to the cloud provider. In addition, collaboration is the heart and soul of DevOps, and the hybrid approach will allow team members working in-house and remotely to work together.

9. Automation: Facilitating a constant feedback loop between various teams.

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DevOps automation aims to perform repetitive tasks with minimal manual intervention and create procedures that facilitate a feedback loop between operation and development teams. With this approach, you can perform incremental deployments and ensure faster releases. As a result, 90% of the enterprises that have adopted DevOps are likely to opt for automated procedures. In addition, predictive analysis is also used in DevOps pipelines to detect and treat problems.

10. Infrastructure as a Code (IaC): Ensuring rapid deployment by eliminating manual processes.

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Infrastructure as a Code (IaC) is a DevOps market trend that facilitates the management and provisioning of infrastructure through code instead of manual processes. With IaC, you can align development and operations teams as both will utilize the same description for application deployment. Some of the critical benefits of IaC are infrastructure standardization, consistent deployment, and rapid implementation.

11. Serverless computing: Eliminating the gap between Dev and Ops to facilitate faster time-to-market.

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Serverless computing allows you to build and run applications and services without thinking about servers. Serverless applications don’t require you to manage servers, as they are abstracted away from app development. Over the last few years, serverless has become one of the most innovative and exciting approaches to deploying software, with the serverless market reaching $30 billion by 2030. Also, more than 50% of cloud-based enterprises have adopted serverless. Serverless brings many advantages to the DevOps process, like operability, as it eliminates the gap between Dev and Ops. It also generates the code for the DevOps pipeline without the host needing to build, test, and deploy.

12. Cloud-native infrastructure: Reducing time-to-market and increasing scalability of software.

Infrastructure layers

Cloud-native infrastructure plays the role of hardware and software by running and supporting applications that exist only in the cloud. It aims to reduce go-to-market time and bring more efficiency, which aligns with the goal of DevOps. Therefore, businesses should implement a Cloud Management Platform (CMP) to adopt cloud-native infrastructure. It would help them to manage and utilize cloud resources efficiently.

13. Microservice architecture: Opening the door for continuous and frequent delivery of applications.

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So, microservice architecture or microservices are dominating the IT industry. They are tailor-made for DevOps trends because it aims to break down monolithic applications into smaller and manageable chunks, simplifying development, testing, and deployment. It also facilitates continuous and frequent delivery of applications. With microservices, it’s simpler to streamline DevOps processes and improve the overall quality of products.

14. Containerization: Providing a solid base for continuous deployment and delivery.

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Containerization is one of the current DevOps trends that deal with the packaging of software that contains elements such as libraries, frameworks, and other dependencies. Today, 50% of the applications use containers, and there has been a 109% increase in their use in the last five to six years. Containers are lightweight and self-contained, making them easy to host, build, test, and deploy. Continuous deployment and continuous delivery are two building blocks of DevOps, and that’s where containerization plays a significant role because each container carries software with all its dependencies that ensure faster app deployment and delivery.

15. Kubernetes: Ensuring minimal deployment time by enabling autoscaling of resources.

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Kubernetes (K8) is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services. It offers an autonomous and continuous container-based integration ecosystem that allows developers to scale up or down the resources. That is why 48% of developers today use Kubernetes for container orchestration. In addition to all these numbers, Kubernetes facilitates cross-functional collaboration and ensures minimal deployment downtime, aligning with DevOps standard best practices.

16. Edge computing: Bringing enterprise apps closer to their source of truth to improve response time.

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Edge computing is a distributed computing framework that aims to bring enterprise applications closer to the source of truth, such as IoT or local servers. The benefits of this system are faster insights, improved response times, and better bandwidth availability. The edge computing market will become $275 million by 2025 and get used in 5G, IoT, AI, etc., where you need a quick response and delivery, and CI/CD does that.

17. Data observability: Empowering teams to identify, troubleshoot, and resolve data issues.

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Data Observability deals with the health and the state of the data in your system. It involves activities to identify, troubleshoot, and resolve data issues in real-time. Continuous monitoring is one of the critical elements of the DevOps lifecycle, and that’s where observability plays a crucial role. Industry leaders who have adopted observability have saved over $20 million by reducing downtime. Observability leaders have reported 60% more successful product launches and a 69% increase in MTTR for unplanned downtime or degradations.

18. Platform engineering: Ensuring seamless collaboration between Dev, Ops, and SRE.

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Platform engineering is one of the critical DevOps trends for 2022 that focuses on building toolchains and workflows to enable self-service capabilities. In addition, platform engineering is about developing an ecosystem that ensures seamless collaboration between Dev, Ops, and SRE. Lastly, many firms struggle with manual procedures in code deployment; that’s where platform engineering can reduce the cost of this operation by enabling automation.