The Future of DevOps

Let's talk about the near future of DevOps as I see it over the next 10 years.

👽 Let me say up front that I didn't consult any astrologers — everything below is a compilation of information gathered from various corners of the internet, seasoned with my personal opinion.

Migration away from the cloud

▪️Partial migration, in the form of building hybrid environments, will take place in the coming years for economic reasons, as well as in line with companies' updated security policies, when they want to store and process data on their own premises.

Kubernetes on bare metal

▪️K8s on bare metal will keep gaining momentum following the point above, so you'll have to get to grips with the finer points of deploying a cluster on your own. It will suddenly turn out that the cloud has spoiled us rotten, but there's no way around it.

AI/MLOps

▪️Another consequence of the move away from cloud solutions will be the stronger adoption of MLOps — that is, the operations needed to support the full lifecycle of working with so-called artificial intelligence. Many companies are already running ML in-house, but with the broader adoption of AI this trend will only intensify.

Tooling

▪️It looks like tools such as Crossplane will become more widespread. Pulumi, a similar tool that lets you describe infrastructure using general-purpose languages, is also breathing down Terraform's neck. This removes Terraform's limitation of only being able to use its proprietary HCL, but it comes with the need to know yet another language. This is one more piece of evidence that programming is a highly desirable skill for DevOps engineers.

☝️But fundamental knowledge stays in demand no matter what, so don't forget to invest in it first — you'll easily pick up something like Crossplane later.