Each year, I identify the DevOps trends that I think will have the most impact on the developer community and software providers over the coming year. These trends are generally applicable across industries, as is often the case with DevOps, but I like to
select those that I believe to be the most essential for financial services organisations. This year, I’d like to do the same and focus on what I see as being the most crucial emerging areas of focus for the industry.
A common theme in this year’s trends is the renewal of the application portfolio with the rapid increase in consumption of public cloud, open source and SaaS offerings in 2022. Here’s three trends for the year ahead.
Securing the software supply chain
The software supply chain was the significant security trend across industries and job functions in 2021. Software mirrors real-world supply chains where resources are consumed and transformed through a series of steps and then supplied to the customer.
It is an immense and multifaceted process, ranging from the procurement of the open source embedded in applications to the public cloud services utilised in the operating environment and the DevOps platforms businesses depend on to deliver products and services.
In the age of SaaS, applications increasingly involves assembling and integrating components available in the public, open-source domain. In the supply chain of software, compromised software can be difficult to trace and remediate. Using open-source and
distributed communities helps with assurance. The use of open source has been built on the foundation of safety in numbers, as the community will quickly identify faults, but we must continue to be vigilant. Companies must be able to quickly identify software
and services at risk, and insulate against it.
In 2022, inspecting and mapping the supply chain is critical to gaining a full picture of risk exposure. Creating a software bill of materials (SBOM), reviewing third party obligations
to update vulnerable code, locking down build environments and rapid incident response will be key to the management of software supply chains. It is a multi-layered problem that will require the collaboration of Development, DevSecOps, and site reliability
engineering teams to solve.
Feature flag-driven development
A core aim for any business delivering services through applications is ensuring a great user experience. A key component of creating this experience is the seamless delivery of improvements and new features while ensuring services remain available. With
the help of continuous delivery tools and practices, software developers are able to release updates more quickly than ever, with shorter lead times and increased frequency of deployment with fewer failures. Companies offering continuous delivery services
have emerged and thrived over the last decade to take advantage of a growing market. In 2022, by de-risking deployments and bridging the divide between developers and product managers, feature flags will empower teams practising or looking to practice continuous
delivery.
Feature management platforms enable safer continuous delivery by decoupling deployments in production from the release of features to end users. This is achieved by defining what is exposed and who it is exposed to through flags. Flags conceal code pathways
when disabled, reducing the risk of that code residing in production. When a feature is ready to be released to users, the flag is simply enabled, eliminating the need for a new app deployment with the release of each feature. For a banking customer, such
a flag might be a quick-access feature that allows the user to see their last ten transactions.
With this decoupling, engineering teams can deploy to production when they want while product managers enable functionality for specific customers at their convenience. Feature flags can also be used to gather valuable feedback early on in a feature’s life
through A/B testing with a select group of customers. This creates agility for the business. For operating teams, feature flags unlock targeted, incremental delivery to groups of end users and, through integration with a monitoring tool, allow them to disable
a feature automatically if it negatively affects availability.
In 2022, a team looking to up their continuous delivery game should evaluate how feature flags will help them do so.
Container-based serverless apps
Container-based serverless applications on Kubernetes will prosper this year with the exciting news that Google has announced its intention to
donate the Knative project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The donation recognises the adoption and use of the project to drive innovative new products. Event-driven serverless deployments provide scalability for variable workloads, as
well as those that are difficult to predict. A serverless application will automatically scale up in response to incoming demand and then scale down to zero after use.
Knative extends Kubernetes to run applications using the serverless methodology, which creates portability across traditional and cloud-based infrastructures. With Knative, developers can write and deploy their serverless applications with the knowledge
they can run on-premise, across multiple cloud locations, or at the edge using the same interface. Operations teams can align resource allocation to application use and optimise availability across a hybrid set of infrastructure.
According to Gartner, by 2025 85% of companies will have software running in a container in production, and much of this software will take advantage of serverless frameworks.
So, there are my top DevOps trends for 2022 and beyond. Let me know if you agree with these three and share your thoughts on other trends in the comments below.