DevOps Trends for Developers in 2023

Nowadays, every organization is considered a software organization. With the rise in cloud-native...

Nowadays, every organization is considered a software organization. With the rise in cloud-native tools, the DevOps approach is increasingly becoming popular. The year 2022 saw a huge momentum in the topics such as AI/ML, automation, security, etc. DevOps practices are constantly evolving, and it is our job to keep an eye on what to focus in the coming year.

While security has always remained one of the biggest challenges for organizations, GitOps made a great move with cloud-native deployments, especially Kubernetes-related deployments. Many such trends positively impacted developers and organizations. However, keeping up with technological advancements and trends is very difficult. To make your lives easier, we are compiling some DevOps trends that will significantly impact the coming year.

Let us see those trends and how they will impact developers and organizations.

1. Increase in Kubernetes adoption and deployments

Kubernetes is an open-source platform for managing containerized applications. It was designed by Google and contributed to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). It is a container orchestration system that helps with the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. The main idea behind Kubernetes is to provide a way to manage large groups of containers as a single unit. This allows users to deploy, upgrade, and maintain their software efficiently.

The adoption of Kubernetes is steadily increasing, becoming the de-facto standard for container orchestration. The increase in adoption can be attributed to the following reasons:

• Kubernetes is free and open-source software that Google developed.
• It simplifies the process of deploying, scaling and managing containerized applications on a cluster of Linux hosts.
• It has an active community of contributors who are continuously making improvements to it.
• It has strong support from major cloud providers like Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud and Alibaba Cloud.

We predict that, soon, Kubernetes will take over the entire market, and every organization on the planet will opt for Kubernetes deployments. The community and the momentum this platform has created is mindblowing, and it will continue to rule over other platforms and deployment types.

2. Security automation will gain momentum

Security automation is the concept of automating security processes and tasks to ensure that your applications and systems remain secure and free from malicious threats. In the context of CI/CD, security automation ensures that your code is tested for vulnerabilities and other security issues before it gets deployed to production. In addition, by deploying security automation in your CI/CD pipeline, you can ensure that only code that has passed all security checks is released to the public/customers.

This helps to reduce the risk of vulnerabilities and other security issues in your applications and systems. The goal of security automation in CI/CD is to create a secure pipeline that allows you to quickly and efficiently deploy code without compromising security. Since manual testing might take a lot of time and developers' time, many organizations are integrating security automation in their CI/CD pipeline today. This saves your valuable engineering time and reduces the overall cloud cost. Also, the introduction of AI/ML in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) is getting attention as the models are trained to detect irregularities in the code and give suggestions to enhance or rewrite it.

Harness security testing automation (STO) is built to automate security in your CI/CD pipeline. You can automate your unit, integration and load testing through this module and make sure there are no flaws in your code and pipeline.

I predict that the automation part in security will become a reality, and organizations will finally understand the importance of automation in security.

3. There will be a rise in chaos engineering experiments

The competition is rising, and every organization wants high availability with its products and services. Well, it is not just an SRE’s job to keep things straight and up all the time; this approach called chaos engineering is taking over the organizations to test their products, services and systems around endurance, resiliency, reliability and uptime. There has been a lot of talks around this strategic approach, and we think it becomes really important for organizations of all size to adopt it.

Chaos Engineering is not just about finding and fixing bugs. It is also about understanding the behaviour of your systems and applications under extreme conditions. By testing the resilience of your systems and applications with Chaos Engineering, you can gain a deeper understanding of how your systems and applications behave under extreme conditions. A chaotic environment is one where things happen at random times and places. In other words, chaos is unpredictable. This unpredictability makes it difficult to predict how a system will behave in response to certain inputs. If we build our systems with this in mind, we can make them more reliable and resilient. You can run controlled chaos experiments through Harness’s chaos engineering module.

I predict that the use of chaos engineering and chaos principles will become more natural.

4. Docker will continue to enhance the developer experience

If you’re a developer looking for a way to simplify your development lifecycle, Docker is the answer. Docker is an open-source platform that allows you to build quickly, package, and deploy applications in the cloud. It’s a powerful tool for developers that can help accelerate your workflow and increase productivity. With the recent introduction of Docker extensions , things have become easy and accessible for developers. While many thought Docker would be dead after Kubernetes deprecated its support, that isn’t the case. Docker was initially anyways not built with Kubernetes in mind. There might be alternatives, such as Podman, but the community that Docket has built is enormous and beyond imaginary. It takes many years to replace Docker, as it has been engraved in developers' minds and blood when working with containers and containerized applications.

I predict that Docker isn’t dead and it still has a lot to offer. With recent improvements, Docker will again emerge as a DevOps super tool.

5. GitOps gains even more trust

GitOps is a modern DevOps practice that is taking the software development world by storm. It is a combination of two popular technologies - Git and Kubernetes - and is gaining traction due to its ability to streamline the DevOps process. GitOps provides a way to manage application deployments and updates in a more automated, reliable, and secure manner. It is designed to make collaboration between developers, operations, and other stakeholders easier, faster, and more reliable. By automating the entire process, GitOps simplifies the entire DevOps cycle, from development to test to production, making it the go-to choice for DevOps teams. With its ability to reduce manual effort, improve reliability and security, and increase efficiency, GitOps is quickly becoming the future of DevOps.

GitOps helps teams enhance operational efficiency, reduce costs, and accelerate time-to-market. With its focus on automation and agility, GitOps is quickly becoming the DevOps methodology of choice for modern organizations, giving them the tools they need to stay ahead of the competition. Harness uses the power of Argo CD in the backend for GitOps and adds additional capabilities for more advanced dashboard for more visibility, continuous verification, etc. You can get a demo of Harness GitOps-as-a-Service .

I predict that the GitOps approach will skyrocket and will be adopted by every organization working with Kubernetes.

6. Internal developer platforms become more important

The development of software applications is in a state of rapid evolution as organizations are increasingly investing in internal developer platforms to streamline the development process. These platforms are changing how software applications are created, leading to faster, more efficient, and more reliable development. Internal developer platforms are designed to support the entire software development life cycle, from concept to completion, and provide developers with the tools they need to create and deploy applications quickly.

With the help of these platforms, software developers can create and deploy applications faster, better, and with more scalability, creating a future in which applications are created and deployed quickly and efficiently.

By leveraging the power of internal developer platforms, organizations can stay ahead of the competition, creating better, faster, and more reliable applications without sacrificing quality. From simplifying the process of developing applications to providing access to powerful analytics and machine learning tools, internal developer platforms are revolutionizing the way software is created. It is expected that these platforms will quickly become must-have platforms in engineering organizations.

I predict that internal developer platforms will become an integral part of the engineering teams in every organization and help in assisting the learning and development of in house developers.

7. Multi-cloud deployments will be on the rise

Multi-cloud deployments are becoming increasingly popular in the tech world and are the best way to go. With multi-cloud deployments, you can easily expand your digital infrastructure, reduce costs, and increase the efficiency of your operations. Multi-cloud deployments are a cloud computing architecture where applications and services are deployed across multiple cloud providers. This means that instead of relying on a single cloud provider, you can use the resources of multiple cloud providers to host your applications and services. The primary advantage of multi-cloud deployments is that they allow you to access diverse services and platforms.

Organizations use this approach to ensure they use the best-in-class services from each cloud provider. This strategy also ensures the cloud providers' services are always up and available, so there are rare chances of downtimes with your applications.

I predict that a multi-cloud approach will become necessary for organizations to sustain and have more flexibility over their workloads.

Conclusion

Every organization wants to embrace DevOps best practices, speed up their software development and deploy faster. New tools and methodologies keep emerging every day, and it is up to the organization’s preference which approach and tool to pick and use. It is very important to be up to date with the technological advancements that happen every year. Note the trends we have predicted in the article and try to adjust yourself. As DevOps continues to evolve, teams will need to work together more closely than ever to ensure successful projects.All in all, it's going to be an exciting year for DevOps!

What do you think will make an impact for developers in 2023? Share your thoughts in the comments.