A year ago I called DevSecOps, continuous delivery, cloud and AIOps as the trends for 2021. Most of those landed. For 2022 the picture gets more interesting because DevOps is no longer a single wave — different parts of the market are at very different stages of adoption. To make sense of that, I map the 2022 trends onto the technology adoption lifecycle: late majority, early majority and early adopters.
Quick Review of 2021#
Before looking forward, a quick look back. DevOps adoption did accelerate, security genuinely started shifting left, continuous delivery pipelines matured, cloud became the default, and AIOps stayed early but real. None of those trends are finished. They just move into different segments of the adoption curve in 2022.
The Technology Adoption Lifecycle#
Geoffrey Moore’s adoption lifecycle — innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards — is the right lens for DevOps trends in 2022. The same trend means very different things depending on where your organisation sits on that curve. A late-majority enterprise still rolling out CI is in a different conversation from an early adopter wiring up AIOps.
Late Majority: Continuing DevOps Adoption#
The late majority is finally getting serious about the foundations. In 2022 that means continuous integration done properly, monitoring and logging across distributed systems, infrastructure as code, containerization, orchestration with Kubernetes, and cloud as the default deployment target. None of this is new. What is new is that organisations that resisted for years are now executing on it because they can no longer compete without it.
Early Majority: DevSecOps, Observability, GitOps, FinOps, Continuous Testing#
The early majority is where most of the interesting movement happens in 2022.
DevSecOps is huge, driven by the growing volume and severity of cyber-attacks. Security tools wired into the pipeline, security owned by the product team, and security gates that do not block delivery.
Observability moves beyond traditional monitoring. Metrics, logs and traces combined to answer questions you did not know you would have to ask. The shift is from “is the system up?” to “why did this user request behave the way it did?”
GitOps uses Git as the single source of truth for infrastructure and deployment state. It pairs naturally with Kubernetes and gives you auditable, reversible operations.
Enterprise continuous delivery pipelines scale CD beyond a single team to portfolios and product groups. Standardisation, golden paths, and platform teams that own the pipeline as a product.
FinOps brings financial accountability to cloud spend. As cloud becomes the default, the bill becomes the conversation. FinOps is the practice that keeps it honest.
Continuous testing moves test automation from a CI checkbox to a strategic capability. Shift-left testing, contract testing, performance and resilience testing as part of the pipeline.
Early Adopters: AIOps#
AIOps is where the early adopters are investing in 2022. The promise is leverage: machine learning helping operations teams find anomalies, correlate alerts, and automate incident response. The reality is still messy — data quality, model drift, and tool sprawl. But the leaders are no longer asking whether AIOps is real; they are asking how to roll it out.
Key Takeaways#
Map trends onto the adoption lifecycle. The right trend depends on where your organisation actually is. Do not chase early-adopter trends if your foundations are not in place.
Late majority: nail the basics. CI, monitoring, IaC, containers, cloud. Boring, foundational, and still where most of the value sits if you have not done it.
Early majority: this is where 2022 is happening. DevSecOps, observability, GitOps, enterprise CD, FinOps and continuous testing are the active edge for most enterprises.
FinOps is the new conversation. Cloud bills are the new ops cost. Without financial accountability, cloud spend gets out of hand fast.
Observability is more than monitoring. Build for the questions you have not asked yet.
AIOps is for early adopters. The leverage is real, but so are the data and tooling problems. Pilot before you scale.