️🚀🚀 Top 3 DevOps Trends to Watch Out for in 2024 📈

Staying updated with trends is important to remain competitive and relevant in the industry.

As we stride into 2024, the landscape of DevOps Engineering will continue undergoing a transformative shift. The challenges we face — complex deployment workflows, information & access management of internal teams, and most importantly keeping tabs on what’s running in production — are more pressing than ever.

At Flipt, we continually discuss technologies that can bring change to the industry. In this article, we delve into cutting-edge top trends and tools that can redefine DevOps and platform engineering this year.

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TL;DR

Trend #1: More eBPF tracing adoption
Trend #2: GitOps becoming mainstream
Trend #3: Internal Development Platforms everywhere

Trend #1: More eBPF tracing adoption

eBPF will remain trendy in 2024. It allows deep insights into kernel activity with minimal performance and impact. Tracing tools like bcc and bpftrace are becoming increasingly popular for troubleshooting performance issues.

Before, to get application tracing and performance metrics, you’d have to manually add and configure libraries such as OpenTelemetry in each application. This is painstaking and error-prone — as it requires application or DevOps engineers to do it for each new application they want to deploy.

Tools like Odigos have discovered a new way, leveraging eBPF to automatically add tracing to each request path as they make their way through your stack. This is a game changer as it gives much-needed time back to your engineers, reducing toil along the way.

Moreover, it’s open source and community-driven, providing readily available resources and support.

Trend #2: GitOps becoming mainstream

GitOps is another emerging trend in DevOps that emphasizes treating infrastructure as code and managing it through git repositories.

This approach leverages the familiar workflows and tools of Git for:

Deployments
Configuration changes
Infrastructure updates

At Flipt, we believe that the future is declarative. This means that you should quickly be able to see what state your application is in, but more importantly how it got in that state to begin with. GitOps solves this issue by using familiar tools like git, pull/merge requests, CI/CD to deliver configuration changes — instead of your engineers making API requests or clicking around in a UI (#clickops).

We believe this is the best way to manage all configuration data, even feature flags. That’s why, we’ve gone all in on supporting GitOps workflows at Flipt (with a lot more to come soon). We even have a guide to get you started.

In 2024, we'll see even more adoption of GitOps methodologies in larger organizations that are traditionally not early adopters, as the concept has proven itself to be a winner for smaller, more agile teams in previous years.

In a world of fast-changing requirements and business needs, GitOps enables DevOps teams to respond quickly.

Trend #3: Internal Developer Platforms everywhere

Finally, a trend that I am most bullish on in 2024 that leads to:

Faster CI/CD cycles
Streamlined workflows
Improved governance and compliance

is Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs).

These are web-based platforms that provide developers with self-service access to tools, resources, and environments needed for their work.

Building an IDP from scratch is hard work. That’s why projects such as Spotify’s Backstage and Port exist to help bring internal developer platforms to organizations without the time, budget & ability to build them themselves.

I prefer Port’s opinionated UI/UX over Backstage which requires you to write React components for new integrations.

Whichever tool your team chooses, giving developers a single place to control all aspects of your engineering platform — means less time responding to requests and internal issues from your platform team.

DevOps teams need IDPs for greater autonomy and efficiency.