2023 Techstrong Research Trends for DevOps | Predict 2023

Hi everybody, Mike Rothman general manager of tech strong research. Come back. I ran all the way down the hall.

No actually didn't have to move anywhere. I Did shovel a couple of links from that standpoint to be able to to be back with you to go through the devops trend? So again in terms of predict?

It's really a text wrong research driven show this year. And what we are going to do is kind of go through and really kind of talk it and greater depth in terms of all of the trends that we have again. You've got in the event Hub.

You've got the ability to download this so you can read it for yourself and add some more context to what it is that we're doing. So I'll take the next 20 25 minutes to go through our trains really kind of show and and discuss on our position and why it was that we came up with these Trends and again give you guys a sense to interact. So if you're here, welcome if you are not Hopefully you're hearing this auto recording.

But if you do have questions just pop them into the Um into the chat, we've got our friend Kim who is one of our start basically our operating person. She makes everything happen in real time. So Kim's here to make sure that that kind of all your questions get in front of me.

I'm so this is really kind of the main Trend right Mitch and I just went through this right so I'm not gonna spend a lot of time here. I want to dig into each of this specific trends that we have underneath this but the reality is there was a big dust up last year about devops's dead. Right?

And the reality is a lot of that. I think Mitch mentioned a little while ago that it was really clickbait and it kind of was right and and back I guess folks kind of learn the wrong lesson when Richard Steen about a thousand years ago and the security space said IDs is dead and created a crap storm all over the place and everybody thinks well, if I call it Dad I'm able to talk about, you know, kind of my new thing right my new new thing the real is Devops is here devops is here to stay devops really underlies everything that we kind of do from a modern software and Technology development environment. We mentioned right here whether it's being developed for Weber mobile application SAS Services iot devices Edge Computing platforms or anything else it is it is built and deployed using devops mentality right using devops philosophy and we're seeing other kinds of Ops right data off step second Ops AI Ops, right so all of these different kind of Capabilities right all these different initiatives are really kind of driven out of that core devops philosophy and one of the things that I've seen right and and I think that you know kind of being an older person gives me a little bit of perspective that that some of the younger group may not understand but I've seen this movie before right what I've seen is when we stop talking about stuff it is actually starting to happen and that's kind of counterintuitive because you sit there and go well if we're still doing it, why wouldn't we be talking about it?

Why wouldn't folks be hyping it because remember the technology business is driven by the next new shiny thing. The fact is it's a really big world a really big world and the early adopters, right? The folks are on the front end of that adoption curve continue to make noise about stuff and then they move on to the next thing.

Well, it turns out if you think about a bell curve right there at the very front end of that bell curve and then the rest of whether the you know back to Jeffrey Moore's model, right whether they're the, you know, the early majority of the late majority or the laggards. They're having all that technology and that Innovation kind of happen way later than we ever talked about it. Right.

So you start to see the adoption curve, right the leg of the the inflection point really start to hit about now. So devops, we're not going to be talking about at that much. That's because everybody is sitting there doing it.

Right and I just want to hit you know on another thing, right, you know SRE versus platform engineering. We'll talk about that in a minute when we kind of dig into some of the other Trends but we're mixing apples and arches here, right? You know, the reality is devops is a philosophy devops is a framework right SRE and platform engineering those are roles and those roles have specific tools.

So we're talking apples to oranges there and we don't and shouldn't, you know get confused. So our first Trend our first train within devops right Culture Club a critical path item for sustainable devops is cultural Evolution and finally breaking down the silos between development operations data and security. This involves fostering collaboration addressing trust issues finding common ground with other critical functions, including as I had just mentioned SRE and platform engineering what Does that mean it basically means that devops is a philosophy was really predicated and built in order to break down a lot of these Sil.

OS right Break Down The Walls between development between operations for a little bit of security in there right and break down these walls and make sure that we're in a position to move faster right that we're in a position to move faster. Well, some folks have gotten there other folks maybe a little bit less. So so what we're really talking about here with the Culture Club aspect of our devops trend is we have to keep chipping away at these silos.

We have to keep you know, kind of breaking down those walls taking quick wins right taking a small victory and then moving forward with it. And how do we do that? We basically have shared incentives, right if the developer folks are really focused on developing code.

What are they going to do? and focus on code right if the ask people are Mobile, you know, it's all about availability. They're gonna optimize their activity based upon making sure that things are available.

We've got to ensure that both teams, right or all three teams you throw security into the mix and and some other folks as well are pulling in the same direction that all of the metrics that underlie their incentives there objectives there bonuses candidly, right our focused on delivering customer value that everything focuses and delivers customer value. We want to make sure that we've got visibility across all of our silos and teens, right you can't expect the developers to understand the impact on operations of what they're doing if you don't tell them So we've got to kind of have a shared mentality a shared set of data that we're looking at shared dashboards Etc that are going to give us that visibility so that we understand what's happening in these other teams and we can make changes in our world that will flow down the pipe and and favorably impact the others role is not Frameworks. I did allude to that a little bit before right.

This is nonsense about you know, kind of devops being dead and and replacing devops. That's not the point. Right devops is the underlying philosophy srem platform engineering are specific roles within those two within those environments which are going to get facilitate and make sure that we can keep things up and running right and and that we are optimizing our platforms for consistency and reliability.

And ultimately we also have to empower our teams, right? Devops is all about streamlining really manufacturing delivery of core technology. So folks have to be empowered in order to make the changes that they have to to Really deliver.

Right and ultimately that's what it is. They have to be empowered to deliver and that means sometimes you've got to just go and you know consensus is great sometimes Often but it is great. Sometimes what you do have to make sure that you are ultimately empowering your teams to make the changes they have to in order to be successful.

So that is Trend one Culture Club Trend number two. 8 million Cloud native developers are building applications requiring scale resiliency and Rapid delivery of software favoring Cloud native architectures using microservices service mesh serverless orchestration and containers practically speaking delivering microservices at increasing velocities requires a robust and well functioning devops environment to deliver applications at scale. So get your prices are these guys they do devops they do Cloud native.

So, of course, she's gonna put some Cloud native stuff into you know, the devops trend and you would be right. Of course, I'm gonna put some Cloud native stuff into the devil. I was trying because Cloud native and the success of cloud native really kind of is dependent on devops that are there.

So yes, the Technologies are there the open source is certainly kind of critical to what it is that we're doing and how devops and a lot of devops Rel. Did capabilities I have been able to be deployed because you don't have to spend a crap ton of money on a bunch of commercial software to make it happen. But the reality is these it's it's like a codependency thing.

It's hard to see over time how devops really, you know, kind of prospers, you know really becomes that major philosophy, even though it's there without kind of the assistance from cloud native and I can tell you that cloud native is really going to struggle without a lot of the, you know, kind of underlying operational capabilities that are inherent to devops. So what are the key themes here increasing velocity? All right Cloud native Technologies can optimize workflow pipelines for microservices and really make sure that we can move faster which is really a Hallmark of what we're trying to achieve with devops.

And ultimately we want to improve our observability get back to the first one we talk about having to give a better visibility across our silos observability really helps us do that whether it's metrics or traces logs making sure that you know, we can Understand what's happening at all levels within the application stack within the technology stack to really optimize our environment. So we're going to be looking to move faster. We're going to be looking to have better visibility through Cloud native infrastructure.

And that is going to really continue to favorably impact devops. Now, let's hit our third Trend hardening the pipeline. And this is something that again is a 30 plus year security professional is near and dear to my heart.

Right? The pipeline is the Cornerstone of the software supply chain and as such managers and organizations software intellectual property, therefore devops workflow pipelines and Tool chains must be reliable. resilient and secure as more organizations gain devops expertise.

They will reassess early tool choices and build an environment appropriate for their culture. So what is that all mean? Basically, that means that whether we like it or not.

Our company's software intellectual property is running through the pipeline. There's no way around that's where the stuff is. Scarily enough.

We spend very little time actually securing that I didn't maybe this was a little bit, you know kind of representative of the older days right when we were building out, you know kind of Jenkins or one of the other, you know kind of Open Source options bamboo in order to you know, kind of build out our pipelines and and really build up our devops tooling environment and we didn't spend enough time, you know, really kind of locking these things down now in a lot of cases we're using SAS services for a lot of these capabilities, I would expect, you know, identity and access management to become pretty critical to ensuring, you know, you've got the right entitlements for who's getting access to that but again that all highlights The fact that we have to make sure that we're spending an inordinate amount of time to ensure that our pipeline is protected. So what are some of the sub themes here devops platform versus best of breed components and we're starting to see that already right, you know, folks like Microsoft with you know, kind of GitHub actions and get lab which is out there with an integrated Circle CI right? There are a whole bunch of different companies that have integrated really fully functional broad solutions for the entirety of of kind of the devops platform.

8 million developers. Yep on that. So, okay keep your questions coming if you want to hit them.

That's that's great, you know hit them in the chat, but you know back to the point right devops platform. We have to decide whether we want kind of an all-in-one totally integrated solution or whether we want to continue to be the best of you know, the general contractor integrating all of these best of breed components and we've got resource constraints. We've got skills gaps.

So there's a lot, you know to be said about kind of this integrated experience where you already have security built in you already have a lot of the automation, you know built in to these environments, but I can always make the case that you know, kind of best of breed technology, right, you know kind of folks that specialize just in potentially, you know artifacts, you know repository or you know, kind of the scanning technology that would layer in I you know that there's a role for those folks as well. So it's certainly not an easy decision securing the pipeline, right, you know kind of we've been hitting on that that's really the whole theme of this trend. I guess the conclusion that we draw is not enough folks understand this and when again having seen this movie a number of times before when not enough folks understand the importance of something bad stuff happens, right?

So I would expect that at some point this year. Somebody's you know, kind of devops pipeline to be fully compromised and owned which then results in of course all sorts of software Supply. mean Software supply chain issues on that front and finally our last subtrend here software supply chain security again, we have to start figuring out how to understand how the components that we use are really focused and and what kind of protection they have inherent to their environment, right?

And then you get into s bombs right software bill of materials. We're gonna talk about this a lot more of a lot more from the perspective of the security Trend our one of our panels This Afternoon talks very specifically about s bombs. So we will dig into that at that point too, but we do have to mention it here within the devops set of Trends because that's going to be a key issue.

Right? We don't build applications. We assemble applications and that means that we have to understand what's happening in these components that are there so we did before we move on to Our last devops Trend here.

8 million Cloud native developers. And that's a number we got from the cncf. So take it up with them.

We think it's a pretty good Top Line number in terms of folks that are building, you know, specifically to kubernetes and and other you know, kind of Open Source or or Cloud native types of projects, maybe High maybe low, you know, really the point is less about the Precision of the number and more about you know, kind of the fact that this is an emerging type of discipline. There are a lot of folks that are coming into it and understanding Cloud native is going to be again a key skill set moving forward, okay. So and I did exactly I know I did see your question here as well.

I will get to that once I kind of wrap up with with these fine on this final Trend, which is everything Ops turn number four everything Ops. Devops maturity extends Beyond development to optimizing the operational motions and embracing capabilities like give up get UPS say that 10 times fast get UPS AI Ops and data Ops to ensure that the entire devops environment is performant reliable and security. So basically what we're saying here is that we're going to kind of get off shoots of our devops mentality.

Our devops philosophy or devops Frameworks, right that kind of apply to different things one of the things I didn't mention here because we don't have a fancy name for it comes from security right detection engineering. Maybe we should call it detect Ops for any of you security folks that are here in the devops track take that back to to you know, kind of the people that make these decisions. Maybe we should call it detect Ops but the point is folks that are building detections are using devops philosophies, right?

It runs through a pipeline. It's software that then gets layered into your monitoring infrastructure to look for stuff AI Ops a similar type of thing. How are we managing all of the data all of the training all of the algorithms that drive that we're doing it through a devops pipeline.

How are we managing data? Right? It's through some type of pipeline.

How are we managing the pipeline the stuff that goes into the pipeline? Well, we're managing it with a pipeline. So if that's not, you know kind of inception, I don't know.

What is So I've got a bust out that old Christopher Nolan movie to see you know, kind of how things shake out when we start, you know, kind of doing. Ops, you know get Ops on on kind of the code that runs the pipelines that so pipeline run a pipeline. I think you know what I'm talking about.

So really really the point here is this philosophy this devops underlying philosophy is going to continue to impact pretty much everything that we do in kind of Technology moving forward. So everything option from that standpoint. So as we kind of wrap up this little Trend discussion and then you'll have a couple of minutes break in order to get to the next test stops Jamie puts a comment and test stops.

I love it. Right. So so we need to be opting everything xops since everything, you know, everything is nondescript tends to be an x on that.

So I did get one question from Zachary, which I think is a good one to talk about. What trends do we wish to be canceled this year in in devops? And you know, we didn't have trans last year.

So this is the first one so, I don't know that I'm ready to cancel anything. I'm kind of like feel like a little feel it's kind of one of those things that I I, you know kind of am proud of in terms of the work that we've done on this front, but you know what, I really hope that we make progress in terms of continuing to shift the culture, right? And that's really the first one I think to me that continues to be a critical path item to the ultimate success of devops in most organizations.

If you can figure out how to make these teams work together make them work more effectively and more efficiently. We all win right we all win. So I think again aligning our incentives and providing better.

Visibility to everybody that has a vested interest a stake in our devops world. That is again that's going to be the thing that I would like to see us make progress on this year. Of course being a security person.

I really hope we do take pipeline security. Seriously this year because again, somebody's gonna get hurt and I feel bad about it. But I've already seen the movie I already you know, kind of know how it's gonna end.

It's gonna end badly. So if we can make some progress on culture and if we can, you know spend some time focused on on hardening the pipeline, I think we'll end 2023 in a much better position than we entered it, right, you know, and I guess enter 2024 in a better position than we are right now. So those are our devops Trends.

I want to thank everybody for being here. I think we have one more panel in the devops track. You could also check out the digital transformation track in a couple of Um in a couple of I guess maybe a half hour.

I'm gonna kind of do a similar type of thing for the devops trends but we're gonna dig into everything on that front. But with that I will bid you do until until the next one. So again, thanks everybody for being here looking forward to seeing you through the rest of the day here at predict 2023.