The past couple of years pushed many companies to either jump-start a digital transformation or kick their current initiative into high gear. For the first time, they needed to meet the demands of a remote workforce and customers who had no other choice but to engage with brands online, meaning businesses had to embrace cloud-based delivery to remain competitive. According to a report by Gartner, “digital capabilities” was the only category in which CEOs planned for increased investment in 2021.
Even though the importance of and investment in digital transformation picked up steam, most companies are still not where they need to be. Why? Because DevOps initiatives are lagging as well. Another Gartner report states over 75% of businesses think DevOps efforts have yet to meet expectations. And, the success of DevOps and digital transformation go hand in hand.
DevOps initiatives are behind because the IT industry is dealing with complex software delivery ecosystems and also struggling with a significant skill-demand gap. Cloud and developer tool adoption continues to increase to help enable digital transformation, but as the number of tools in the market grows, so does the complexity. As enterprises embark on massive innovation journeys, they need to enable agility and innovation, while enhancing security, compliance and governance and reducing cost and risk.
In 2022, some trends will pick up steam to help wrangle this complexity and set digital transformation and DevOps initiatives back on track.
No-code development is something that has been on the rise to help with developer productivity and efficiency. As we head into 2022, no-code DevOps orchestration will emerge as a critical success factor for helping software teams address these challenges. No-code DevOps orchestration provides automation across the life cycle of DevOps, from managing diverse toolchains to creating automated workflows with integrated security and providing intelligence across the software delivery life cycle. There are three key benefits no-code DevOps orchestration offers that will be particularly helpful in the coming year.
With the explosion in digital transformation and multi-cloud ecosystems, software delivery has also become quite complex. Across the various stages of the software development life cycle, engineers use a variety of best-of-breed tools to develop, integrate, test, deploy and manage software. Tool sprawl is also driven by the diverse technology needs of different applications and use cases, as well as organic growth and acquisitions. It can be very complex, time-consuming and expensive for companies to connect and integrate all of these tools — and build and manage the pipelines to deliver software from idea to production. This requires developers to write a lot of scripts and glue code, most of which are not even part of the end product. This challenge is only compounded with the skills gap.
No-code DevOps orchestration practices can enable engineering and DevOps teams to instantly provision and integrate their choice of CI/CD and DevOps tools — and also build scalable no-code declaratively in minutes for various use cases using a common framework. Developers can thereby be freed up to focus on building and shipping their core products, enabling faster go-to-market without worrying about the complexity of stitching together and managing their underlying tools and pipelines.
Shifting security and quality left in the development process is nothing new. But, shift-left practices have still not reached widespread adoption. In 2022, shifting security left will be more crucial than ever, especially since software attacks are on the rise. How do you ensure pipelines are secure? How can you minimize bugs and rework to maximize productivity? How can you ensure compliance with the right levels of access and proper approvals while deploying software?
You can do this by integrating security, quality and approval thresholds and gates into pipelines declaratively through a DevOps orchestration framework. Security posture can be significantly enhanced by automating code, container and infrastructure scans as well as threat and vulnerability checks in a proactive manner by integrating the appropriate security tools. Adding automated quality checks such as unit and integration testing into pipelines ensures fewer issues and outages post-deployment and a much better customer experience. Automating approval gates through integration into collaboration or issue tracking systems helps ensure compliance. Shift left security achieved via the no-code orchestration of pipelines will also enhance collaboration between development, security and quality engineering teams.
As software delivery complexity increases across multiple applications, platforms and cloud ecosystems, so does the risk that comes with poor visibility and reporting. Teams are also frequently behind when it comes to visibility and insights across a complex DevOps ecosystem.
No-code DevOps orchestration enables the abstraction, correlation and contextualization of metadata and logs from different tools across the DevOps spectrum to enable actionable insights for different personas. Real-time unified logs across tools help minimize troubleshooting and resolution times, and cross-functional metrics and scorecards can help track and optimize efficiencies, security and compliance. Predictive insights driven by machine learning capabilities can enable proactive identification and self-healing or prevention of issues.
Continuous software delivery management is vital for businesses hoping to meet customer expectations. Leaders should focus on delivering new capabilities to their customers as fast, securely and cost-effectively as possible, rather than wasting limited engineering resources on building, integrating and maintaining complex tools and pipelines. No-code DevOps orchestration will play a key role in helping enterprises accelerate and optimize their digital transformation journeys.
