5 Big DevOps Changes to Expect in 2017

Thoughts from the CEO desk

2017 started off with a DevOps bang; an enormous amount of capital was poured into DevOps technology companies by VCs, and larger-scale adoption of tools and methodologies was approved in this year’s IT budgets with the recognition that DevOps is a “must-have”. These changes follow a Gartner Report from 2016 which revealed that most organizations will use and implement DevOps by the end of this year. A survey of 252 Gartner Research Circle members showed that 38% were already using DevOps in 2016, and an additional 35% have plans in place to implement DevOps in 2017. That's over 70% of the IT market we are addressing!

While budget is there, DevOps is relatively new, so it’s only natural that many organizations lack experience with the technologies and tools. In this evolving and maturing world, key players seek fundamental standards and a definition of ROI. Unfortunately, some companies in the DevOps domain still appeal to niches suggesting answers to the "trend" while failing to step up to address the real pain and acknowledge that DevOps is a Revolution and not a trend!

As we kick off 2017 we calibrated our goals based on what we expect to see happening. Here are some of the changes we predict will happen in 2017 in response to the DevOps landscape.

Change #1: Continuous Update

Vendors will embrace and address the real pain!

Continuous Integration, Continuous Testing, Continuous Delivery vs. Continuous Deployment - these are all part of the evolution in software automation that has impacted DevOps implementation. However, none of them solve or provide an end-to-end solution that addresses the real pain that challenges our customers and community. In today's hyper-connected world, when every company has become a software company, and software update releases must happen at a much faster pace, an innovative IT pipeline must obey the rule of "Release Fast or Die!". Nobody at the company management layer and none of your customers care if your tools are integrated or if you perform an integrated deployment. You need to release more, faster, and to continuously update the compute edge . It isn't surprising that when asked (see Gartner survey result below) "Which of the following outcomes has DevOps created for your organization?" the vast majority reply, "FAST"!

Continuous Updates will be JFrog's main focus in 2017. We, the “binaries people”, see it as our mission to solve our customers’ real pain and support their increasing need to release software updates faster with the highest quality guaranteed.

Change #2: Universal tool to serve all technologies

IT leaders will look for reliable and universal solutions,

Every organization, regardless of its size or industry, works with more than one technology. You might use Java, C++, .NET, NPM or Python as your programming language while using RPM, Debian or Docker for packaging and shipping. The world of DevOps will have to provide you with a universal solution! It doesn't make sense to use a different solution for each technology anymore. There’s no time for evaluation; it's production time, and developers and ops people want consolidation and a universal approach. Speaking of production, it’s not good enough to have a "reliable" tool; all of our Enterprise customers, including Cisco, Oracle, Twitter, Netflix, Credit Suisse, and over 3,000 more, have realized that their data-centers must be clustered and Highly Available. This means that DevOps tools will have to provide HA solutions with five-nines availability to earn the ticket into the software release pipeline and production environment.

It has been 3 years since we released the first HA version of Artifactory and it is still the only real HA solution in the market. With the latest 5.X release, JFrog provides a cloud-native solution with no requirement for an NFS to empower your HA setup.

JFrog offers a Universal, HA solution as a concept. It has been written that JFrog’s Solution is “too integrated to fail". We see it as the right way to code. All of our users and customers should have the freedom to choose their technologies without needing multiple solutions from different vendors. They all need a Docker registry, NPM registry or Maven repository; they shouldn’t have to install and maintain multiple solutions nor pay more.

Change #3: Freedom of Choice

On-premises or cloud; hybrid models will empower DevOps

Freedom of choice is not just about your in-house technology, it’s also about the infrastructure you are riding on. Cloud providers have realized two main things:

• Offer competitive prices when you charge per volume. In 2017 we should expect to see storage and bandwidth prices diminishing even more.
• Attract developers with a full suite of services. The cloud services market is not the "real-estate" market it used to be. AWS, GCP and Azure are fighting over developers and coming up with DevOps solutions to formulate better service packages.

We expect that technology providers will need to give the "Freedom of Choice" to the DevOps community. JFrog offers different variants of its solutions: Open source and commercial solutions that are offered both on-premises or in the cloud. And beyond that, we let our community choose what works best for them: JFrog solutions are offered on Amazon, Google, Akamai and MS Azure.

Change #4: Software Security Matters!

The ball is on the edge, it is not in the hole yet,

Improved information security is starting to become a heavier burden on the automated software lifecycle. The fact that you can release faster doesn't mean that you are safe and can now have a fully "hands-off" process! Software packages must be monitored and the pipeline should include an automated way to detect components with security vulnerabilities, outdated software packages, or OSS licenses that are forbidden by corporate policies, and issue informative and targeted alerts that you can act on.

In 2017 it will not be enough to offer a simple "alarm solution". The DevOps revolution requires a smart solution that enables:

• Universal scanning; the world needs something that goes deeper than a "container scanner"; something that is not just a container-centric solution
• Understanding and displaying how one component affects others, managing a dependency graph and analyzing it
• A combination of metadata and security information aggregated from a variety of sources to form a comprehensive security database
• Automation - DevOps teams should be able to break a build when vulnerabilities and other issues are detected and protect their production environment

I’m talking about DevOps BI. Tools and solutions should offer more than notifications; a learning organization would like to gain insight from each failure and from technical answers, to enable ROI calculations.

JFrog Xray and JFrog Mission Control are two tools we released in 2016 to address these needs. These tools already support most of the above, and in 2017 we will make sure they ride on the pipe between Artifactory repositories and Bintray distribution platform to secure software and provide data to DevOps teams.

Change #5: Business models will support users scale

Increased release velocity will be facilitated by business models that let you scale easily

2017 will not be a “proof of concept” year! Organizations and late majority adopters would like to hold on to their tools for several years. They all understand that a fair business model should allow them to scale, and that if you keep counting seats, users, CPUs or whatever - you can't scale nor build a budget.

A fair business model supports scaling up and will not block you from taking the next leap forward. Users cannot and should not be concerned about whether they have reached maximum usage or not! Tools should satisfy the DevOps hunger and support it.

Old-school models that take advantage when you scale up have no place in the DevOps world when budget is being managed bottom>up. It’s all about scaling and automation. The number of developers on your team will continue to expand, and your DevOps solution must be able to expand with that growth.

swampUP 2017 - Living on the Edge of DevOps

Once again this year JFrog will hold its user conference to share more of what we do at the swamp. We will gather the world's DevOps leaders at swampUP in Napa Valley, CA. The speaker lineup already includes tech talks and best practices from Google, Atlassian, Yahoo, CloudBees, Oracle, GitHub and more; and similar to last year, our Community Gala Dinner will be the place to meet with peers and colleagues.

Keep your eyes on the frogs, 2017 is going to be an amazing year. We are focused on the real pain of DevOps, determined to improve the end-user experience and look forward to setting the market standard to ensure we all release faster and safer!

We see ourselves as the developers of the change we all see in the market, this giant evolution we call DevOps.

May the frog be with you, as you leap forward!