Security and value emerged as two important aspects of DevOps as 2022 unfolded. Yet, with as much success as organizations have achieved implementing their own DevOps strategies, many others struggled to make it work for them.
Part of the struggle is an outgrowth of the “shift left” strategy advocated in the DevOps space, leaving developers overwhelmed by tasks such as testing and security that they haven’t been trained for. This has led to a growing sense of developer dissatisfaction as they have less time to write the code for innovative solutions they love to create.
Further, with the rise of cloud native computing, developers in many cases are having to create infrastructure environments for testing, staging and pre-production, which further erodes the time they have to be creative.
When DevOps first came into being, it was thought that these practices could bring developers and operations teams together. In many ways, though, organizations simply shifted a lot of operations functions onto developers. Today, we’re seeing what D2iQ’s VP of Product Dan Ciruli called a “recentralization of control,” as the recently named platform engineering teams (which used to be called infrastructure teams) work to make developers more productive by standing up and running infrastructure for them.
Another trend seen in DevOps this year was around automation. Companies began implementing automation in their CI/CD pipelines, in testing and in identifying and remediating issues throughout the development life cycle.
On the security side of things, a big trend in 2022 saw organizations creating software bills of materials (SBOMs). These help organizations understand what’s going into the software they’re creating, whether it’s code written in-house or an open-source or third-party component.
DevOps news items making headlines this year include the CD Foundation announcing CDEvents, a vendor-neutral specification for defining the format of event data; the partnership of Opsera and Octopus Deploy to create a no-code DevOps orchestration layer, and a Tasktop-Broadcom partnership to enable companies to better measure their business value.
Also, in March, Codefresh launched its Software Delivery Platform that brings the Argo toolset into a single platform, which the company described as “enterprise-class tooling for Argo, built on GitOps best practices.”
In July, Broadcom announced its plan to acquire VMware for $61 billion, though the deal had yet to be finalized as of late November. And in June, GitLab 15.0 was released with capabilities for container scanning and speeding up workflows in the WYSIWYG Markdown editor for wikis.
In the fall, the DevOps Institute, under the direction of Jayne Groll, announced SKILup IT Learning, a subscription-based online education website. The top tier subscription comes with certification preparation video training courses.
Also this year, SD Times published a four-part series from EPAM consultant Jack Maher and V.S. Optima co-founder Pavel Azaletsky explaining DevOps feedback loops. The first, which examines delayed feedback, and the rest of the series can be read here.
Increasing interest in VSM
This year also saw the increase in both interest and offerings around value stream management.
Value stream management is being touted as a solution above Agile and DevOps that will finally bring the IT side and the business side together, working toward the same goals of delivering value to customers while continuously improving their operations.
According to a Forrester report earlier this year, the number of vendors offering products in this space has about quadrupled from its first report in 2017, when few people had heard of VSM. Now we’re seeing companies entering the space such as Broadcom, ServiceNow and Atlassian creating solutions, to go along with early players ConnectALL, digital.ai, HCL and Plutora.
In July of this year, portfolio management company Planview acquired early leader Tasktop to implement its Flow Framework into its products.
Also this year, SD Times produced its fourth {virtual} VSMcon event. One of the highlights was this talk – using events from the film “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” – titled, “If you don’t stop to secure DevOps as part of your VSM, you could miss it.”
And, in September, the OASIS open-source standards consortium created a Value Stream Management Interoperability (VSMI) Technical Committee to develop standards for how tools within the DevOps organization can share data between them, allowing for better insights and decisions.
