Coming Soon: AutoOps

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at products in the DevOps toolchain and paying attention to where they are going, what they are doing that is new and how they are differentiated. That has led me to one inescapable conclusion: AutoOps is on the way.

What is AutoOps?

AutoOps is full robotic automation; the continuing progression of what has been building for the last couple of years. We have DevOps, GitOps, DevSecOps, IaC, CloudOps, AIOps … and the list is still growing. But they all move toward one thing: AutoOps.

Now that development has been fully integrated into DevOps, the market is moving to do the same for operations. It is harder with operations because DevOps had Agile, but it is coming. And it is coming to your org.

That is a good thing, in my opinion. Compliance almost demands it; what we currently call AI enables it and staffing in hard macroeconomic times will make it appealing.

The questions that you should start asking now are what does the organization need to enable rapid deployment, management and upgrades while leaving humans in control for the majority of decisions?

Some of you are living this. I have a friend that is in a GitOps shop with automated CloudOps where they are implementing AIOps to handle minor day-to-day things and monitoring for drift … but they’re the exception; most of us are nowhere near there.

Knowing that is where we are heading means you can plan – and it is glaringly obvious this is where we are heading. Vendors are branching from their current subset of XOps to take us there and eventually, we will have a full end-to-end vendor that can do everything from GitOps to fully automated rollout, green/blue deployment, monitoring and drift correction with human intervention only where the organization wants it. Some vendors are already very close to this environment and I expect that several will get there in the next year or two via acquisitions or partnerships.

We just don’t think of the overall DevOps/concept to retirement SDLC process in the absolute terms that AutoOps requires, but we’re going to want to because the environment is changing. The changes are for the better, but they will be massive and cause disruptions. However, they’ll make everything better in the end by eliminating error-producing bits while leaving us in control of the flow and process.

Start Planning for AutoOps

So start planning, understand what your organization wants and needs from the coming full-robotic automation I call AutoOps, and keep kicking rear. Eventually, we’ll have systems that can do a lot of Dev and Ops work, but that day is a ways off, and will require people to manage the systems that manage the systems… Funny but true.

*I’ve never seen AutoOps used anywhere with regards to IT, I just thought it describes where we’re headed pretty well. Let me know if you’ve seen a better term coined by a smarter person. Or a not-smarter person that has a cooler name for it.