As crazy as it seems, here we are on the cusp of another Thanksgiving. This year has gone by so quickly, and as we enter the holiday season and the end of 2022, those of us in the DevOps community have much to be thankful for. First and foremost, I’m so happy to once again see my colleagues and friends in-person at conferences and events around the world. I’m looking forward to resuming travel not just in the U.S. but the rest of the world and seeing DevOps enthusiasts share their knowledge, their experiences and further the state of DevOps.
While we are thankful for the resumption of a more normal lifestyle, we also need to pause to acknowledge and mourn for those we’ve lost during this terrible pandemic. Their lives and the time taken from all of us during these past years can never be replaced.
They say every dark cloud has a silver lining; if there was a silver lining for DevOps during the COVID-19 pandemic, it was the unprecedented pace of digital transformation. Make no mistake—digital transformation is powered by software development and DevOps powers software development. It wasn’t just the sheer number of applications or lines of code that were developed and deployed during these past few years, but the accelerated maturity of software supply chain software pipelines that became the de facto standard for how software is developed and deployed; that was greatly accelerated as a result of the push to digital transformation.
It was not just software development that was accelerated, software supply chain attacks gave rise to an entirely new subset of security. Software supply chain security and SBOMs are now everyday words in the security lexicon. While I’m not happy about an entirely new class of attacks, I’m grateful for the response the White House and the U.S. government gave to our industry as a whole to address software supply chain attacks. I’m also grateful for the continued evolution of tools and techniques, people and processes around DevOps.
While some look to make marketing hay by proclaiming that DevOps is dead and other such nonsense, the truth is that DevOps is thriving. It is the way software is developed today. In fact, in conjunction with cloud-native, it would seem that we have a whole new stack and an entirely new way that software is created.
Looking forward, on the horizon we continue to see the development of AI that is making a real impact on observability, testing and application management. I think we’re also on the verge of AI having a profound impact on software development, as well. Low-code/no-code development tools paired with AI promise to take some of the most mundane software development tasks and automate them. This will free up overworked software developers to focus on higher-value software development tasks.
Despite macroeconomic conditions putting a damper on the entire tech space (if not the entire world economy), I remain enthusiastically bullish about the continued growth and maturation of DevOps and I am excited to see what the weeks, months and years ahead bring. I am grateful to be involved in our industry during these heady times, and I’m grateful to you, our readers, supporters and the community for your continued support of our company.
To that end, I wanted to announce that we’re trying something new this year at Techstrong Group, and we hope you’ll join us. We want to know what you believe makes tech strong—and we’re asking people to record a quick TikTok video or LinkedIn video with the hashtag #Techstrong. We’ll select the winners and are giving away two (2) Sony PlayStation5 game consoles to the best two entries as selected by our judges. You can get all the details on our social media channels on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
So, now you know what I’m grateful for—we really want to hear what you’re grateful for and what you think makes tech strong! Throughout the holidays and the new year, we wish you health and happiness—and know that tech will remain strong!
