NEXT BIG THINGS IN DEVOPS / JEWELS IN THE DEVOPS CROWN
DEVOPS has brought in such a revolution in software development so much so that the SDLC can be viewed as before and after DEVOPS. Almost all of the today’s business demands while developing a software like shorter development cycles, continuous release and deployment, reduced implementation failure, reduced IT costs, innovative mind-set, better communication between teams, early detection of errors, greater customer satisfaction - all these can be achieved by implementing DEVOPS. While DEVOPS has been crowned as one of the best methodologies for SDLC since its inception, there are certain new technologies which aid as jewels in the DEVOPs crown. These new technologies, when incorporated into DEVOPS, can make SDLC more agile, more flexible, more secure, better results and less worry! Let’s take a look at the most shining jewels in the DEVOPs crown.
DEVSECOPS:
In a typical DEVOPs methodology, the super optimised automated flow makes applications delivery fast without manual effort from developers, testers etc. and the new version is ready for security checks for any vulnerabilities and other security issues. These may include vulnerable or outdated 3rd party libraries being used by the developers, licensing issues, container images having security issues, Kubernets components being misconfigures and many other security issues which developers may not be aware of while developing the application. Identifying all these issues at the deployment stage and rectifying those takes a lot of time and may delay the CD process. Also, by the time the security team rectifies all the vulnerabilities and loop holes of the present version of the application, a new version of the same will be ready for testing again as it is continuous integration process. The answer to this bottleneck is integrating security team with the development and operations team right from the start. Instead of handing over the application before deploying to the security team, if they are integrated into the DEVOPs team, they can check and also advice developers about such issues developers may not be aware of. This saves a lot of time and also provide more security especially if your application is an online banking app, social media platform app, e-com platform with lots of credit card information and other sensitive personal data because you want to make sure that there are no security holes in your application as getting hacked and leaking sensitive data of your users may be detrimental to your business.
AI DRIVEN:
Businesses are transitioning from a traditional infrastructure of a separate static physical systems to a dynamic mix of on premise and various cloud platforms which are running on virtualised or software defined sources that scale and reconfigure constantly based on the need of the hour. Applications and systems across these environments generate huge amounts of data which the traditional domain based IT management solutions cannot keep up with. They cannot intelligently segregate the significant events or cannot provide real time insight and predictive analysis. IT operations teams need to respond to issues fast enough to meet the user and customer level expectations. This is where DEVOPS can take the help of Artificial Intelligence, AI. AIOPS provides visibility into performance data and dependencies across all environments, analyses data to identify significant events which are related to slowdowns or downtimes and automatically alerts the IT team to problems, root causes and recommended solutions. AIOPS is artificial intelligence for IT operations and is considered very important for all the businesses because it grasps big data by assembling a diversity of data from various IT operational devices to detect and act automatically to issues in real time using artificial intelligence and machine learning.

MICROSERVICES:
The problems that arise from a monolithic architecture when developing large applications like hard to detect bugs, difficulty in adding new functionality, complexity of large code, slow start-up time due to the size of application – all these can be solved by incorporating microservices into DEVOPS. Microservices is an architectural approach where the application is broken into different loosely linked services. Each service in the application operates as an independent service and this architecture allows for each service to scale or update without disrupting other services in the application. As everything is broken down into separate services, development teams can also divided to handle each service. This makes the whole application more flexible and allows DEVOPS teams to address issues effectively. Bug detection can be easy because the development team can fix the affected service where the bug was identified. All this without affecting the other services in the SDLC or the downtime. Moreover, if any service requires a new feature, developers can develop and deploy it in production without affecting the development process of other services. This approach simplifies the development and testing process while allowing services to be modified independently.

LOW CODE:
A low-code development platform provides a development environment used to create application software through a graphical user interface. Any novice can build entirely operational applications from these platforms and for experienced developers too, these can be useful for developing application that require additional coding for specific situations. These low-code development platforms provide visual and graphical tools and simple frameworks that mask more complex coded operations so that the application designer does not have to directly touch the code that performs desired operations. But to create larger, more complex applications, the ones that need to communicate with other enterprise systems, or need extensive customization or cross organizational boundaries and the likes, the visual only approach is frequently inadequate and in such cases, developer expertise is often needed to mend the code to ones needs. Low-code tools will continue to become more mainstream and in the near future, low-code platforms becomes the norm for critical enterprise projects too as these support every phase of DEVOPS.