We talk about what trends will continue to gain momentum in 2022, what is the beauty of Kubernetes and why system engineers will have to pay more and more attention to regulations governing the protection of personal information.
Multi Cloud and hybrid solutions
It’s no secret that using the cloud as the main platform for business reduces investment and provides system flexibility. This approach is partly formed by the need for migration to/from the cloud, and many of the customer’s systems begin to duplicate themselves during this period. Greenfield projects (projects that do not have so-called legacy – restrictions imposed by previous work; similar to greenfield land building) prefer to start immediately in the cloud.
All popular cloud providers have their pros and cons, so a multi-cloud strategy that is gaining popularity allows you to get the best combination of price and quality of services.
Containerization
This tool makes it possible to implement those functions that seemed magical to DevOps specialists a couple of years ago: it is one of the best it infrastructure management solutions which allows you to bring the possibilities of working in local data centers closer to their cloud analogues.
Kubernetes solves many problems related to networks, helps to quickly and easily integrate numerous services – it’s enough for me to write manifestos, run them… and they will start working. The main “plus” of Kubernetes implementation is to simplify work with infrastructure. Moreover, Kubernetes is changing the perspective of the infrastructure as a whole, gradually turning hundreds of thousands of automation strings into simple YAML files.
But this transformation also requires a transformation of the worldview of the engineers themselves: the “launched script – and ready” approach will no longer work. It is replaced by a script: “Added code to git, passed the code review, ran through pipelines – you can install.”
Serverless technologies
Key cloud technology providers – Amazon (AWS Lambda), Microsoft (Azure Functions) and IBM Cloud Functions – are actively developing serverless technologies. This is the next stage of evolution after containerization and a separate direction in CI/CD practice.
When a serverless organization of a system or application, the engineer runs the code without thinking about where it will be executed. Cloud service providers have already solved this problem for him. They support an invisible infrastructure that is scalable to the needs of a particular application: no worries about configuration and requirements, developers are only required to write code. It also globally changes the approach to organizing continuous integration – it is no longer possible to test your code on a local server “fastly”.
Regulations in the field of personal data protection
In professional slang, this is called regulatory compliance. I am engaged in CI/CD automation and increasingly face a variation of the same question from customers – “How do you plan to comply with the requirements of industry regulations?”
And in some industries – for example, health care or banking – regulatory acts dictate the development process. Therefore, any system engineer nowadays needs to know at least at the basic level what GDPR and HIPPA are (find info).
For example, a department has already appeared in ERAM, whose task is to check the application infrastructure for compliance with security standards. The DevOps direction is divided into narrower specializations: DevSecOps → DevSecTestOps → Cloud&DevSecTestOps.
Automation
Time-to-Market has always been one of the priorities of automation, which has consistently held top positions in the list of IT trends for many years. Started with the launch of bash scripts (command line scripts written for the bash shell), automation has evolved and moved to CI/CD platforms with a huge number of pre-installed quality control tools and even automation automation itself: for example, the ability to automatically create Jenkins pipelines when a new service appears in project development; deploy clusters within a few minutes.
Today, automation comes to the fore in a variety of business areas. For example, there is an internal open-source project ERAM – EDP (EPAM Delivery Platform) – which is designed to automate CI/CD. Simply put, this is a framework that allows you to quickly and unifiedly configure CI/CD pipelines.