2021 DevOps Trends and Future Predictions

Based on external forecasts and the author’s own experience in DevOps, this article outlines the eight key DevOps trends anticipated for 2021.

1. Infrastructure Automation (IA) – Mature IA tools will enable large‑scale, reliable automation of on‑premise and cloud services, supporting multi‑cloud orchestration, immutable infrastructure, self‑service environments, and efficient resource allocation.

2. Application Release Orchestration (ARO) – ARO tools will combine pipelines, environment management, and version orchestration, delivering greater flexibility, productivity, and visibility for faster, reliable releases.

3. More Complex Toolchains – Toolchains will become broader and more integrated, with CI tools evolving to simplify build scripts, pipelines gaining security features, and package/container managers advancing rapidly.

4. DevSecOps Growth – Cloud‑native security will become essential as organizations adopt Kubernetes, serverless, and other cloud technologies; DevSecOps will be widely adopted, integrating security and compliance into the CI/CD flow without slowing development.

5. Application Performance Monitoring (APM) – APM solutions will shorten MTTR, improve service availability, and provide deeper business insights, increasingly leveraging machine‑learning for noise reduction, anomaly detection, and root‑cause analysis.

6. Cloud Management Platforms (CMP) – CMPs will help manage public, private, and multi‑cloud resources, offering orchestration, service‑request management, cataloging, monitoring, optimization, migration, and compliance capabilities, thereby increasing I&O flexibility.

7. AgileOps Evolution – AgileOps will be used by I&O teams to boost agility, with emphasis on learning DevOps, Kanban, Gemba Kaizen, and continuous improvement to support non‑development use cases.

8. Chaos Engineering as Standard Testing – By 2023, many DevOps teams will incorporate chaos engineering into their test suites, reducing unplanned outages and improving system resilience.

The article then presents the author’s own predictions: CI/CD will become an ubiquitous R&E efficiency platform; cloud‑native technologies will continue to dominate but require careful adoption; DevSecOps will remain a priority; AI will increasingly automate environment management, vulnerability detection, and monitoring; and people‑centric practices—learning opportunities, open‑source community involvement, and feedback loops—will be critical for sustained DevOps success.

Finally, the author emphasizes that early DevOps adoption, combined with these trends, will enhance design, build, deployment, and maintenance capabilities, keeping organizations competitive.

References to the original sources are listed at the end of the article.