DevOps 'won't exist in five years' says AutoTrader
While DevSecOps is the next big flavour, adds Tesco
DevOps "as a buzzword will fade away over the next five years", while security teams will need to join the "continuous cycle of change" as the trend matures.
These are the insights of a panel of industry experts discussing the future of DevOps at Computing's DevOps 2016 Summit this week.
"I think the traditional outlook of sys admins and network engineers will all have faded away, but I also think DevOps as a buzzword will fade away over the next five years," said Mark Crossfield, technical architect at Auto Trader.
"Let's not forget that DevOps existed five years ago."
Rob Charlton, cloud DevOps architect at luxury mobile phone firm Vertu, concurred:
"I'd say in theory, DevOps in five year's time should have faded into the background as we all [grow to] understand what DevOps is, and we've naturally adopted all the practices," said Charlton.
"Also, in five years time enterprise IT will just about be ready to start adopting DevOps, and the rest of the industry will have probably moved onto something else by then," he quipped.
"It'll be NoOps, maybe, as a movement, or LessOps, and just worrying [generally] about implementing more business logic. I think the silos that exist at the moment will be largely evaporated."
Meanwhile, Tesco's head of software development, Steve McDonald, believes that another sub-trend to soon join the fray will be DevSecOps:
"If you go back to where DevOps came from, we had "agile development" and what we wanted to do with that was deliver quicker and get more feedback, so the changes we made introduced instability to the system, and made us break stuff. And we mitigated that by getting the ops guys on board too," said McDonald.
"But after what we saw last year with so many breaches, what we need next is to bring security into DevOps. It's not about aligning, it's about convergence - the security team need to be part of the continuous cycle of change."
Ola Apata, DevOps and cloud engineer at Discovery Communications, observed that many businesses are currently moving towards "a situation where the ops and the devs have to move apart, and that middle bit will become something completely different".
"The term DevOps is misleading - I would rather say DevOps pipeline, because it's the process of moving coding from development to production." said Apata.
"So in five years' time, I'd assume, all these different bits that companies are working on to make that integration - that flow from development to release easier - will make a better framework of how to work when the dust has settled.
"At the moment we don't have that, and different companies are trying different ways to make it work for them, and how it works with different people in different companies.
Apata described the current DevOps landscape as still being in "the discovery moment", where firms are still "trying to find out the best way to make this particular process work better".