Fifteen DevOps trend predictions for 2022

DevOps has come a long way and will undoubtedly continue to shine this year. Many companies are looking for best practices around their digital transformation. It's important to understand where leaders think the industry is headed. In that sense, the following article collects senior DevOps responses to DevOps trends in 2022.

Let's see what each of them has to say about DevOps in the coming year.

1. Migrating to microservices becomes mandatory

"The shift from a single service to a microservice and container architecture is a must for the digital transformation of all companies. It is no longer one or multiple selections. Kubernetes will be used more, and Terraform will be the ultimate automation infrastructure of choice when organizations adopt multi-cloud."

——Sachidananda Pattnaik, Lead engineer at Wipro DevOps.

2. Mixed mode will become the deployment norm
"2021 accelerates remote working, accelerates migration to the cloud, and transforms DevOps from a best practice to an essential part of every business. As we move into 2022, the industry will adopt hybrids in multiple ways:

• Companies will fully adopt a hybrid workforce, combining the advantages of remote working with on-site team collaboration.
• Business models will become hybrid, such as meetings that combine virtual scale with local networks.
• Hybrids will become the deployment standard as companies modernize their stacks to take advantage of cloud on-premise technology but realize that not everything can be done without PREM.

3. DataOps will flourish
"DataOps will certainly surge in 2022 as a result of the novel Coronavirus outbreak expansion. The consumption of digital content has risen dramatically due to COVID-19 and the home-working situation, requiring automated scaling and self-healing systems to reach a new level of automation to meet growth and demand. So far, the enterprise set up the system logging, monitoring, and alarm (ELK/EFK sports, Prometheus/Grafana/Alertmanager), it's time to speed up the pace, use of the available data and indicators to generate valuable insights, Learn and apply machine learning models to predict accidents or outages, and develop automation to learn from data on its own to improve budget planning and forecasting capabilities. Many people have started calling for MLOps/AIOps to solve this problem."

4. Resilient testing will become mainstream
"In my view, the intersection between observability, performance testing, and resilience testing will become mainstream. With the recent Ops issues of leaders like AWS and Google, and the acceleration of digital transformation across all verticals, the market will come to realize that the unlimited scalability offered by public or private clouds is not enough."

5. GitOps Will become the norm
"A 'you build it, you own it' development process requires tools that developers know and understand. GitOps is the name given to how DevOps uses developer tools to drive operations. GitOps is a way to achieve continuous delivery. More specifically, it is an operational model for building cloud-native applications that are uniformly deployed, monitored, and managed. It works by using Git as a trustworthy source of declarative infrastructure and applications. As commits are pushed and approved in Git, the automated CI/CD pipeline changes your infrastructure. It also uses the DIff tool to compare actual production status to source-managed status and alert you when discrepancies occur. The ultimate goal of GitOps is to speed up development so that your team can safely make changes and updates to complex applications running in Kubernetes."

6. There will be more migration to server-free
"2022 will be the year of more server-free migrations. If container and choreography are generation Z. Live load on none server will be generation Z+. The per-use fee will only be paid when you use the model. The per-use payment will only be made when you use the model. Pay-per-view and pay-as-you-use may look the same. But consider running k8S Pod-based microservices to run the same service on a server-free when needed."

7. NoOps’ appearance
"I would like to see more hosting and reduce our DevOps operations and our customer's operating expenses. More server-free applications, more server-free services such as Aurora, Fargate, Amazon S3, and static websites. Amazon ECS/EKS (new version RE: Invent2020) and cloud management services in your data center allow you to reduce maintenance and development in your data center. Also, move more cloud-native principles and capabilities to the data center."

8. BizDevOps will shine 
"As organizations derive value from DevOps, they move toward cost optimization in terms of architecture and corporate hierarchies. Focus on flexible, cloud-on-site architecture and tools once reserved for "big companies" and packaged for small companies (Snowflake or Hazelcast vs. Oracle/Teradata). FaaS is just getting started (server-free, Lambda, etc.) -- operational issues are being solved, and people realize its potential."

9. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) will have a higher profile
"Infrastructure as Code (IaC): The core principle of Cloud DevOps. Your infrastructure is servers, networks, and storage devices, whether locally or in the cloud, defined as code. This allows companies to automate and simplify their infrastructure. IaC also provides a simple infrastructure version control system that allows teams to roll back to the "last run configuration" in the event of a catastrophic failure. This means fast recovery and reduced downtime."

10. Automation and chaos engineering became very important
"Every step is automated -- build, deploy, test, infrastructure, release. Single line production with required quality control. Faster, repeatable, customizable, and reliable Automation is key to the success of any project. Chaos engineering - a critical aspect in today's hybrid infrastructure world. System behavior and customer experience are tightly coupled, and the sooner you test, the better your customer experience will be."

——Nikhil Bhandari, Group Development Manager, Indian Development Centre, Gibraltar.

11. Cloud-native computing approaches tend to be standardized
"Because the cloud space has become so advanced (in the last ten years or so), containerization has become the norm, and everything is very standardized, almost as it was in the mainframe era. Of course, there will be trends and opportunities to make money. But I don't think the next big disrupter is anything. Everything is the same as the best practices of five years ago, only more reliable. I think more and more people will continue to move from Pets to Cattle, while tools like Ansible and Puppet will be left to Packer and Cloud-Init to build container hosts. In my opinion, this is the golden age of software development. DevOps and the local cloud approach have achieved a lot. Pipelines, hosts, storage, load balancing. These days all these problems have been solved in less than five minutes."

12. Security will be a high priority
"Track uncontrolled changes in the infrastructure from a DevSecOps perspective. The infrastructure of the code is great, but there are too many moving parts: the code base, the status files, the actual cloud state. Things tend to go with the flow. These changes can occur for various reasons: developers create or update infrastructure through the Web console without telling anyone to uncontrolled updates on the cloud provider side. Managing the differences between infrastructure and codebase can be a challenge."

13. Chaos engineering will become more and more important
"In many organizations, chaos engineering will become an increasingly important (and common) consideration in DevOps planning discussions. Chaos engineering is the discipline of experimenting on production software systems to build confidence in the system's ability to withstand turbulence and unexpected conditions. If we think of DevOps within the framework of a traditional level 5 maturity model, chaos engineering would be at level 4 and level 5, which falls under the umbrella of DevOps practices. Just as the traditional role of an independent test/quality assurance team is incorporated into DevOps discipline, so should chaos engineering."

14. Focus more on instant logging for quick verification of success or failure
"Use logs in post-deployment to verify that the release was successful or that there was a serious error. The biggest connection people need to make is defining manual processes and then making the giant leap to Automation. One-click deployment and instant logging can quickly verify success or failure and trigger rollback. With that comes complexity and cross-service dependencies, whether something can be rolled back or whether further testing of other services is required. Imagine 100 microservices (pipes, or even another 100 containers). As a project, I always celebrate a successful rollback because it has no impact on the service and is successful."

15. DevSecOps will become the default part of DevOps
"The 'Sec' part of DevSecOps will increasingly become an integral part of the software development life cycle. True security 'move left' will be the new normal. There are fewer dedicated security steps in CI/CD piping, and security intuitive awareness and manipulation will be part of all piping steps. Start with the developer's IDE and move into dependencies and static code analysis. No appropriate software components will be released to mediate these problems. Customers will get a truly free software with no security issues."