3 ways DevOps and remote work will intertwine in the future
Three ways remote work will influence the future of DevOps
I’ve been watching moves to fully remote and hybrid work in response to COVID-19 with great interest. The new remote world’s impact will have some influences on the current and future states of DevOps.
Here are three things I’m expecting to see in the future of remote work and DevOps:
1. AIOps improves DevOps monitoring
Artificial intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) could undoubtedly play a part in the tools that power the remote DevOps team of the future. As cloud-first toolchains grow in dominance, it’s up to remote teams to put in the tools and technologies to tap into all that backend data so the organization can realize a competitive advantage.
I expect to see the AIOps conversation advance a lot during and after COVID-19. DevOps teams — some new to the remote model of working — while migrating legacy applications to cloud services will need to harness data for actionable intelligence about the new working landscape, whether its security risks, cloud cost consumption, and the other operations data that their corporate hierarchy requires making business decisions.
Self-service tool provisioning grows in importance
Self-serve cloud brokerages and cloud-first toolchains become a priority when your development and operations teams are even further spread out. While there’s a fair amount of complexity behind self-service brokerages, I see cloud management platforms (CMPs) filling a growing requirement here. I also see options such as Cherwell, filling in here to power self-service portals in the future.
The challenge I see in the future with self-service deals with such operational models’ complexity and governance. It’s why I’m putting my money on CMP vendors to influence this step. While I like what I see from Cherwell on the service management platform side, ServiceNow is way too expensive and complex for the average enterprise right now.
I predict that self-service tool provisioning will influence DevOps culture for remote teams in the future. It’s going to free remote teams from the internal overhead, politics, and bureaucracy that can hobble productivity, drain morale, and prevent gains in development velocity.
DevOps to DevSecOps moves from discussion to transformation
Moving to an all-remote DevOps team is also an excellent time to advance your DevOps to DevSecOps discussion to action and transformation. DevSecOps, in reality, is aspirational for the average enterprise today. However, every enterprise has room to improve the security of its software delivery.
I foresee the definition of DevOps and DevSecOps becoming the same as time goes on. The security and provisioning changes (not to mention the lessons) that COVID-19 brings about inside the public sector and commercial enterprises confirm that direction from my perspective.
Final thoughts
When I was first introduced to DevOps back in my days as a technical writer, an engineering manager told me that remote teams couldn’t do DevOps. Fast forward to the year 2020; it’s hard to imagine a remote development team not relying on DevOps. The future of remote software development and DevOps are going to be intertwined for the time being.