Two years of trend predictions later, the DevOps conversation has shifted. In 2021 we talked about adoption. In 2022 we mapped trends onto the adoption lifecycle. In 2023 the most useful lens is the value stream: how products get built, run, quality-assured, monitored, organised, enabled and industrialised end-to-end. Most organisations still suffer from silos and project-based annual planning. The 2023 trends are about closing those gaps.
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.
What will move the needle in DevOps in 2021? After a year that forced almost every organisation to accelerate digital delivery, the trends I see for 2021 are less about shiny new tools and more about discipline: making DevOps stick at scale, shifting security left, getting serious about continuous delivery, leaning further into the cloud, and watching the early signals from AIOps.
