JAXenter: What are your DevOps predictions for 2018? What should we pay attention to?

Philipp Krenn: I’m expecting more Serverless and Kubernetes. Hopefully the orchestration discussions are over and we can focus on best practices and working solutions.

Personally, I would wish to get past the speed argument (regardless of what you are doing, the main goal is to do it fast) and move on to stability and security. Shared ownership and rapid deployments are kind of a given by now — maturity is an area where we are often lacking.

JAXenter: What makes a good DevOps practitioner?

Philipp Krenn:  Somebody who helps the business move forward. We shouldn’t get lost in fancy tools or Google’s best practices if it doesn’t get the job at hand done.

JAXenter: Will DevOps stay as it is now or is there a chance that we’ll be calling it DevSecOps from now on?

Philipp Krenn: I’d say that “everyone is responsible for security”, which I think is the most succinct definition of DevSecOps, is part of DevOps. Having different silos and shrugging of responsibility should be a thing of the past.

Do we need another buzzword for it? I would disagree, but if you are publishing hype cycles or magic quadrants you will have a different opinion.

JAXenter: Do you think more organizations will move to cloud in 2018?

Philipp Krenn: It’s probably not a super hot topic any more, but the trend will continue. Few companies have the knowledge and resources to run their own infrastructure better than the big cloud providers. They had their infrastructure patched against Meltdown before you even saw the security advisory, for example.

JAXenter: Will containers-as-a-service become a thing in 2018? What platform should we keep an eye on?

Philipp Krenn: It is kind of the next logical step. And I would say it’s another step into the Platform as a Service (PaaS) direction that we were promised 10 years ago that didn’t really happen back then.

I find AWS Fargate an interesting approach to moving further away from infrastructure worries. Let’s see if that will fulfill its promise.

JAXenter: Is Java ideal for microservices developments? Should companies continue to invest resources in this direction?

Philipp Krenn: I’m pretty sure the microservice hype will be over before Java. Highly distributed applications avoid some problems of the much-hated monolith, but there are no silver bullets. While Java is not the right solution for every problem, I wouldn’t disqualify its stability, mature tooling, availability of talent,… especially since it’s also moving into the space of leaner applications and frameworks.

JAXenter: Containers (and orchestration tools) are all the rage right now. Will general interest in containers grow this year?

Philipp Krenn: Containers will mature and keep growing, but that doesn’t mean they will replace other deployment models. They are a useful tool, but not the only one. We as an industry should stop pretending that there is only one right solution, which everybody has to follow. There are and will be plenty of businesses who are perfectly successful without using containers as their core technology.

JAXenter: What challenges should Kubernetes address in 2018?

Philipp Krenn: Less alpha, more stable. If your CEO knew how much alpha and beta software is running their core business we’d all get fired

JAXenter: What challenges should Docker address in 2018?

Philipp Krenn: Fix or find your business model. Alternatively make sure that the core technology isn’t at risk regardless of what will happen to Docker Inc.

JAXenter: How will serverless change in 2018? Will it have an impact on DevOps? How?

Philipp Krenn: I would expect the tooling and best practices around serverless to mature. It is a very useful tool that will solve some problems and we will learn where it shouldn’t be used.

JAXenter: Will serverless be seen as a competitor to container-based cloud infrastructure or will they somehow go hand in hand?

Philipp Krenn: I think they will complement each other. While containers will move further away from managing infrastructure, both technologies will have their use-cases.

JAXenter: Could you offer us some tips & tricks that you discovered this year and decided to stick to?

Philipp Krenn: Since I work for Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash, I’m mostly focused on the logging, monitoring, and tracing side of things. Most of my tips and tricks are around combining different kinds of events to see the bigger picture, like correlating errors with infrastructure changes or deployments. Only when you combine all kinds of events together you get the full overview.

Thank you very much!