Skip to content
Cover image for 'DevOps Next: 2024 and Beyond' featuring a glowing infinity symbol, representing continuous integration and development in the DevOps journey, with a futuristic digital design

DevOps in 2024: Maturing Practices, Emerging Trends, and the Road Ahead

A new comprehensive study by Techstrong Research, titled “DevOps Next: 2024 and Beyond,” provides a thorough look at the DevOps landscape in 2024. This extensive research, conducted during Q2 and Q3 of 2024, surveyed 326 professionals across DevOps, software development, testing, and platform engineering domains. The global reach of this study, encompassing 62 countries with representation from North America (41%), UK and Europe (19%), APAC (22%), and LATAM (5%), offers an international perspective on the state of DevOps.

The timing of this research is particularly significant, coming at a point when DevOps practices are well-established in many organizations but continue to evolve rapidly. With a focus on current adoption rates, emerging trends, and future directions, this study provides invaluable insights for both seasoned DevOps practitioners and organizations still in the early stages of their DevOps journey.

DevOps Adoption and Maturity

The study reveals that DevOps has firmly cemented its place as a mainstream practice in software development and IT operations. An impressive 80% of respondents report using DevOps regularly across their organizations, indicating its widespread acceptance and integration into daily workflows. This high adoption rate suggests that DevOps is no longer just a buzzword but a fundamental approach to software delivery in modern organizations.

Moreover, the research highlights the growing maturity of the DevOps field, with 60.4% of practitioners boasting five or more years of DevOps experience. This substantial base of experienced professionals indicates a field that has moved beyond its initial experimental phase and into a period of refinement and optimization. Interestingly, while 2023 saw a slight dip in new DevOps adoptions, 2024 is showing renewed growth. This trend suggests that even as DevOps matures, it continues to find new applications and adherents, possibly driven by its proven benefits and the ongoing digital transformation efforts across industries.

AI’s Growing Impact on DevOps

One of the most striking findings of the study is the transformative effect of Artificial Intelligence on DevOps practices. Teams leveraging AI in their development processes are 30% more likely to rate themselves as highly effective, pointing to AI’s potential to significantly enhance DevOps outcomes. This statistic suggests that AI is not just a futuristic concept in DevOps but is already delivering tangible benefits to early adopters.

Furthermore, 41.1% of respondents consider AI-augmented DevOps as “extremely” or “very” valuable for achieving their goals. This high valuation indicates a growing recognition of AI’s potential to address longstanding challenges in the software development lifecycle. As AI technologies continue to evolve, they promise to revolutionize various aspects of DevOps, from optimizing CI/CD pipelines and predicting failures to enhancing resource allocation and automating routine tasks. This integration of AI into DevOps workflows represents a key driver in the next phase of DevOps evolution, potentially leading to new levels of efficiency and innovation in software delivery.

The Shift to Integrated Platforms

The research indicates a clear trend towards consolidated DevOps solutions, marking a significant shift in how organizations approach their DevOps toolchain. According to the study, 32.3% of respondents primarily use integrated DevOps platforms, while 39% employ a combination of platforms and individual tools. This move towards integrated solutions reflects a maturing market where organizations are seeking to streamline their DevOps processes and reduce the complexity of managing multiple disparate tools.

Adding to this trend, 15.8% of respondents plan to switch to a platform approach soon. This upcoming shift suggests a growing recognition of the benefits of integrated platforms, including improved efficiency, better integration between different stages of the software development lifecycle, and more centralized management of the DevOps toolchain. As organizations continue to scale their DevOps practices, the appeal of these comprehensive platforms is likely to grow, potentially reshaping the DevOps tools market in the coming years.

Cloud-Native and DevOps: A Symbiotic Relationship

The study underscores the tight coupling between traditional DevOps and cloud-native architectures, highlighting how these two approaches to modern software development are increasingly intertwined. With 56% of respondents having already deployed cloud-native applications in production and another 21.9% considering it, it’s clear that cloud-native has moved from a niche approach to a mainstream strategy for many organizations.

This widespread adoption of cloud-native architectures has significant implications for DevOps practices. The complexity and distributed nature of cloud-native applications require sophisticated deployment, monitoring, and management approaches – areas where DevOps excels. Conversely, the principles of DevOps, such as automation, continuous integration and delivery, and close collaboration between development and operations teams, are instrumental in managing the complexity of cloud-native systems. This symbiotic relationship is driving innovation in both fields, leading to new tools, practices, and methodologies that are shaping the future of software delivery.

The Rise of Platform Engineering

An emerging trend highlighted in the report is the growing importance of platform engineering, a discipline that complements and extends traditional DevOps practices. The study reveals that 60.9% of organizations are applying platform engineering principles, viewing it as a natural evolution of DevOps rather than a replacement. This high adoption rate indicates a significant shift in how organizations are thinking about their technology infrastructure and development processes.

Platform engineering focuses on creating internal developer platforms that abstract away the complexity of underlying infrastructure and provide self-service capabilities to development teams. This approach addresses several key challenges in modern software development, including the need to manage increasing system complexity, standardizing configurations across multiple projects or teams, and boosting developer productivity. By providing a consistent, optimized platform for development and deployment, platform engineering promises to accelerate software delivery while maintaining the flexibility and innovation that DevOps enables. As this field continues to evolve, it’s likely to become an increasingly important part of the DevOps ecosystem, further transforming how organizations approach software development and delivery.

DevOps and Sustainability

An intriguing development revealed by the study is the growing integration of sustainability practices into DevOps workflows. This trend reflects a broader recognition in the tech industry of the environmental impact of digital operations and the need for more sustainable approaches to software development and deployment.

Organizations are increasingly leveraging DevOps principles to optimize resource use and reduce their carbon footprint. This can involve a range of practices, from optimizing cloud resource allocation to reduce energy consumption, to designing more efficient algorithms that require less computational power. The application of DevOps principles such as automation, continuous monitoring, and rapid iteration to sustainability efforts represents an innovative approach to addressing environmental concerns in the tech industry. As sustainability becomes an increasingly important consideration for businesses across all sectors, we can expect to see further integration of green practices into DevOps workflows, potentially leading to new metrics, tools, and best practices focused on environmental impact.

Cloud Native DevOps in 2024: A Mature Industry

As traditional DevOps practices mature and evolve, we can expect similar patterns to emerge in specialized domains like Salesforce DevOps and other SaaS-specific DevOps offshoots. These nascent areas are likely to follow a similar trajectory, moving from initial adoption focused on basic integration and deployment, towards more sophisticated practices involving AI augmentation, platform consolidation, and sustainability considerations.

The journey of mainstream DevOps offers valuable lessons for these emerging fields. As Salesforce DevOps and similar specialized practices grow, they will likely grapple with similar challenges around managing complexity, enhancing security, and improving cross-team collaboration. However, they also stand to benefit from the hard-won insights of the broader DevOps community, potentially accelerating their evolution.

While DevOps as we know it may be entering its middle age, it’s clear that the principles it espouses are more relevant than ever. The findings of the Techstrong Research study paint a picture of a field that is simultaneously mature and dynamic, with established best practices coexisting alongside emerging trends like AI integration and platform engineering. As software continues to eat the world, the lessons learned from DevOps will undoubtedly shape the future of software delivery across all platforms and ecosystems.

As we look to the future, it’s clear that DevOps will continue to evolve, adapting to new technologies and methodologies while maintaining its core principles of collaboration, automation, and continuous improvement. Whether in traditional software development, cloud-native environments, or specialized platforms like Salesforce, the spirit of DevOps will continue to drive innovation and efficiency in software delivery for years to come.

Post
Filter
Apply Filters