2024: What a Year in the Industry

This year has truly been a watershed year for the DevOps industry as a whole. the phrases “Artificial Intelligence” and “Generative AI” have sucked all the air out of the room, leaving not much else to discuss about the industry. We’ll cover the trends for 2025 soon (AI being the chief of them), but there has been a veritable treasure trove of industry developments that are worth discussing.

AI / Machine Learning

As mentioned, one couldn’t turn around without bumping into something labeled “AI.” Whether or not AI will actually replace jobs or be nothing more than a glorified generator remains to be seen, but it’s obvious that it has profoundly affected multiple industries, and the DevOps world is no exception. The key buzzword in the space has been “AIOps,” or using Generative AI models in DevOps applications, particularly around anomaly detection, root cause analysis, and automated remediation. Since AI models can process large amounts of data very quickly and generate actionable insights from said data, companies have found lower response times and remediation times when adopting AI in their organizations.

DevSecOps

The practice of “shifting left” has come for things like secrets management, cybersecurity compliance, and CVE monitoring. Many tools already exist that handle these (e.g. GitHub’s automated monitoring), but this year saw a dramatic adoption of security practices into their workflows, with software company N-IX reporting that 37% of surveyed organizations have begun “extensively incorporating security into their DevOps processes.”

Serverless

This year also marked a shift towards serverless computing, with services like AWS Lambda leading the charge. While “serverless” and “cloud” are still “someone else’s computer,” serverless computing allows for lower overhead when running jobs, reports, etc., as the need for maintaining the underlying architecture falls away, allowing developers the opportunity to focus on the value-add product and let AWS handle the rest.

ChatOps

Operations from outside the command line have become massively popular in 2024. Usage of plugins in popular collaboration software like Slack allows for all stakeholders (e.g. developers, managers, even users) to participate in the deployment process. A common use case is this - a developer creates a pull request and the reviewers get Slack messages informing them. They can even review and approve the PR from right within Slack. CI/CD pipelines can also leverage these tools by sending alerts when needed into the appropriate Slack channels. At Bullmoose Software, we using SlackOps extensively for all kinds of monitoring. Contact us if you want to learn more about how to set that up for your business.

DevEx

Capping off this year has been a focus on developer experience. Deloitte reports that a dramatic shift towards making the developer experience fun and seamless has been a core focus of companies looking to attract and retain talent. Providing developers the tools and frameworks and infrastructure they need in order to succeed quickly has become a key focus for large corporations. In an ideal world, a developer would be deploying to production on day one (a feat that Etsy achieved over a decade ago), and companies are finally beginning to make the investments they need to make that happen.

Conclusion

The current year has fallen away, and 2025 looks to bring even more fun and games into the DevOps space. Security, ChatOps, and the DevEx revolution signal a bright change in the industry, focusing on innovation and talent retention, realizing that happy developers are productive developers. At Bullmoose, we’re super excited for what the future holds and can’t wait to be a part of it!