DevOps : the 4 breakthroughs enabling continuous change

Since the arrival of COVID-19, digital transformation has become a hot topic — but let’s not forget the fundamental importance of agility and time-to-market.
So, what can you do to ensure that your infrastructure and software development projects evolve efficiently and securely?
Discover how advancements in DevOps are enabling companies to respond swiftly to continuous change.

In nature, the survivors are not the strongest, but those best able to adapt. The same applies to IT architectures, where the decisions you make today will significantly shape your capabilities tomorrow. Until recently, IT architectures were notoriously hard to change, but that notion is now evolving. The starting point: an architecture designed for change and scalability. But how do you actually build it?

You need developers skilled in DevOps — the integration of development ("Dev") and operations ("Ops") roles, processes, and technologies. This fusion eliminates delays and responsibility gaps between the two disciplines, leading to greater efficiency and lower failure risk. Not only does this enable scalable architecture — it also evolves over time.

Here are the four major breakthroughs in DevOps:

1. GitOps: the new game-changer

In IT, digital transformation demands fast time-to-market, more productive developers, and scalability. The open-source platform Kubernetes answers these needs by enabling the automatic deployment, scaling, and management of containerised applications.

Add to that a version control system that captures all relevant information, documentation, and code, and you have GitOps — a natural extension of DevOps, increasingly viewed as the future of the discipline since its emergence in 2017.

But what sets GitOps apart, and why should it matter to you?
If your IT organisation already relies on DevOps for deployments, you’re probably using GitOps principles to some extent. It provides a much-coveted single source of truth for synchronising applications and infrastructure — a major advantage for developers working collaboratively and a clear benefit for business teams aiming to meet their commercial goals.

GitOps simplifies operations, speeds up development, and enhances infrastructure stability. This allows your business to deliver a consistent, valuable, and scalable customer experience.

Now, the next question: how do you ensure your system evolves and improves at lightning speed? 

2. CI/CD: accelerated production

For both business and IT, automating manual tasks is crucial. CI/CD stands out as the go-to approach for this, automating application deployment. If you’re refreshing your application multiple times a day (dozens or even hundreds), you’re relying on CI/CD tools.

The ability to deploy code rapidly and reliably is a huge asset — especially for large development teams.
“CI/CD” stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment, depending on whether the focus is on testing or release. It’s the backbone of modern DevOps, giving teams the speed they need.

But speed alone isn’t enough.

3. DevSecOps: empowering developers with security

IT security is essential for successful digital transformation. The more containers you build and manage, the broader your attack surface becomes. That’s why security must be integrated from the very beginning of your processes.

SecOps (Security + Operations) automates security tasks and ensures that applications meet the quality standards required for deployment. Part of this involves monitoring your tools — but over time, SecOps evolves into DevSecOps.

In this model, security applies not just to apps and containers, but to the code itself — ideally as early as possible in the development lifecycle. The challenge is ensuring that DevSecOps doesn’t slow down your time-to-market.

By embedding security into every step and role, you transform it into a shared mindset — something obvious and universally adopted. With DevSecOps, developers are more responsible for security than ever before, surpassing the level of accountability that SecOps alone could provide.

4. For the cloud-ready future, embrace the cloud 

One of the key trends in DevOps is the shift away from infrastructure management and towards development. This makes sense in a world increasingly migrating to the cloud.

But beware — this doesn’t mean blindly handing over all infrastructure provisioning tasks to software vendors. You can’t always count on them to manage everything flawlessly. Your cloud infrastructure is never immune to outages, so you must know how to troubleshoot and intervene when necessary.

You also won’t need all the tools and default options offered — many may be irrelevant to your needs. Without proper cloud management, plug-and-play solutions can lead to significantly inflated IT costs.

Often, the best approach is to choose a solution tailored to your requirements and available exactly when you need it. Many companies remain wary of the public cloud, but the DevOps mindset can help them migrate gradually and systematically, overcoming their “cloud phobia.”

Today, the public cloud is evolving just as quickly as DevOps practices. If you’re determined to reduce your on-premise IT expenses, you’ll need to get to grips with these changes — as a developer, and as a team.

DevOps is a blend

We’ve looked at the possibilities and opportunities brought by the latest DevOps trends. This paints an ideal picture of a controlled, secure development process with minimal time-to-market. But in reality, things don’t always go as planned.

In many companies, IT environments remain highly heterogeneous — a mix of traditional VMs and containers, or even fully on-premise. This often leads to dreaded silos between processes, people, and technologies.

The DevOps methodology offers a promising recipe for improving your IT processes — but success depends on how receptive your teams are to its culture. DevOps is built on communication, collaboration, and integration.

In a way, it’s like mixing a cocktail — and when the blend is right, the result is something truly satisfying.