New expectations are coming with the new year, placing new questions to people in the industry:  

• What technologies will become relevant?
• What jobs will be in high demand?
• What practices will emerge (or take hold) across organizations?

While many of these questions have been around for some time, by 2025 they are less about what’s coming and more about what has become a baseline expectation for modern engineering teams.

One of the biggest trends coming is in DevOps practices. DevOps aims to replace error-prone and manual procedures managed at the interface between development and operations teams with more robust automation. Incorporating the DevOps framework is vital for company growth because it improves overall work efficiency. 

What is DevOps and why is it important for businesses?

DevOps (a neologism of “development” and “operations”) is a set of practices and tools designed to improve an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services faster than traditional software development processes. This increased speed allows businesses to respond more effectively to customer needs and remain competitive in rapidly changing markets. 

In a nutshell, DevOps is about breaking down traditional communication barriers between development and operations teams. DevOps teams collaborate across the entire software application life cycle, from development and testing to deployment and operations. 

Nowadays, DevOps is increasingly supported by platform engineering approaches and internal developer platforms (IDPs), with a growing emphasis on developer experience, reliability, and measurable business outcomes. So, a DevOps engineer implements these processes, tools, and methodologies to balance needs across the entire software development life cycle, from coding and deployment to maintenance and updates. 

Below are five DevOps practices and methods that continue to drive performance and user experience. 

1. Integrate security practices into applications from the start (DevSecOps)

The last thing development teams want is to release new features that contain security problems. Security outages or degradation have a negative impact on the user experience and can lead to serious business problems. Adopting Open Source Software (OSS) is one of the best DevOps practices, also allowing to improve visibility.  

Everyone in the team is able to see and understand the state of application development, and that is a key principle. Open source ensures that visibility by allowing you to drill down to the code level of all the tools you use. You can’t do that if your pipeline contains proprietary tools. Thus, vulnerabilities in code are validated during software development through CI/CD processes and other security measures. 

OSS is a part of the transition to DevSecOps. Mike Elissen, Senior Developer Advocate at Akamai, thinks that OSS adoption in DevOps embedded security is increasing, which will eventually lead to a stronger DevSecOps culture.

As a result, many developers have become aware of, and responsible for, application security. In fact, by 2025, DevSecOps has expanded beyond early OSS adoption to include software supply chain security, SBOMs (Software Bills of Materials), zero-trust principles, and runtime security monitoring, ensuring protection throughout the entire application lifecycle.

2. Serverless Computing

Serverless computing is a cloud-native development model that allows developers to build and run applications without having to manage servers. Servers are still present in serverless, but they are abstracted from app development. A cloud provider handles the routine tasks of provisioning, maintaining, and scaling the server infrastructure. For deployment, developers can simply package their code in containers. 

Developers package their code (often using containers or functions) and deploy it using event-driven execution models. Serverless applications automatically scale based on demand and typically follow pay-as-you-go pricing, meaning idle functions incur little to no cost.

This approach has strongly supported DevOps adoption by reducing operational overhead and helping teams close the gap between development and operations.

By 2025, serverless computing is commonly used alongside containers and Kubernetes, especially for APIs, event-driven workloads, and AI-enabled processes. Rather than replacing traditional infrastructure, serverless complements platform-based DevOps models by simplifying specific execution scenarios.

3. Microservice Architecture

Microservice architecture, is now widely used in the IT industry and continues to play a central role in DevOps adoption. It basically breaks down the age-old huge-sized applications into more manageable and smaller pieces, simplifying development testing as well as deployment in operations.  

When we think of old, huge-sized applications, we must remember that all processes are tightly linked and run as a single service.  

This means that if a process in the application is in high demand, the entire topology must scale. Because many closely linked processes rely on it, a monolithic architecture increases the risk of application availability. That is because a monolithic architecture is a single, large computing network with one code base that connects all business concerns.

To make changes to this type of application, you must access the code base and build and deploy an updated version of the service-side interface. This makes updates difficult and time-consuming. 

In contrast, with a microservice architecture, an application is built with separate components that run each process as a service. These services communicate via a well-defined interface and lightweight APIs. Because they run independently, each service can be updated, deployed, and scaled to meet the demand for specific application functions. 

Furthermore, it has also streamlined the consistent and frequent delivery of software and applications. Additionally, it has become much easier and simpler to facilitate DevOps processes and principles in order to improve product holistic quality. 

However, as adoption has matured, organizations have also learned that microservices introduce operational complexity. As a result, observability, service meshes, and platform governance have become essential to managing distributed systems at scale while preserving DevOps efficiency.

4. MLOps and AIOps

MLOps and AIOps continue to gain relevance as organizations seek faster releases without sacrificing quality or stability.

AIOps focuses on automating IT operations by using data and machine learning (ML) to detect anomalies, identify root causes, and optimize performance. MLOps strengthens the ML development lifecycle, enabling consistent deployment, monitoring, and improvement of ML models.

Since 2023, these practices have evolved significantly with the rise of GenAI. Many organizations now extend MLOps into LLMOps, supporting the deployment, monitoring, and governance of LLMs and AI agents within DevOps pipelines. This evolution allows teams to improve productivity while maintaining control and reliability.

5. Low Code Applications

Many strong enterprises have adopted a low-code DevOps strategy, which has proven to be extremely beneficial to teams. The low-code approach enables agility, which gives every organization a significant competitive advantage in the demanding and fast-paced software market. Low-code platforms allow businesses and enterprises to create applications without the need of importing coding expertise. 

On the one hand, this allows non-technical professionals to participate in software development through a visual interface that completely manages the process. Users can create logic and workflows by dragging and dropping elements.

On the other hand, low-code platforms are increasingly used by professional developers as well, often enhanced with AI-assisted development features and governed through enterprise DevOps, security, and compliance frameworks, making them a complementary tool rather than a replacement for traditional development.

A position in constant demand growth

Rising these trends emphasize continuous framework improvement to enhance customer outcomes. It is reasonable to believe that the DevOps transformation is an ongoing process. With companies consistently incorporating these methodologies into their systems, having in-depth knowledge of it is a requirement. 

If you need any help implementing DevOps in your company, don’t hesitate to contact us. We’ll be glad to help you. 

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