It’s time for New Year’s predictions. CA’s CTO Otto Berkes already shared his top 5 predictions for areas that will support IT’s evolving, customer-centric mission. So here are my top three for DevOps:

Prediction #1: Ecosystem models drive adoption of containerization and microservices

Technologies are often solutions in search of a problem. But containerization and microservices will avoid that dead end in 2016—because ecosystem models will make them more relevant than ever.

Ecosystem models recognize that no single company can be all things to all people—and that the needs of external and internal constituencies are relentlessly evolving. Monolithic systems from monolithic organizations can never provide sufficiently diverse functionality or sufficiently adaptive velocity to meet these needs.

To offer the greatest value to the greatest number with the greatest competitive equity, you must therefore be able to tap all relevant available resources, whether you own them or rent them.

This ecosystem model makes microservices necessary, because that’s how you maximize your potential combinatorial flexibility. And it makes containerization a necessity, because that’s how you ensure your ability to quickly and confidently execute on any particular microservices “recipe.”

Prediction #2: DevOps becomes an operational and political necessity

We already understand why DevOps is such an important operational capability in the application economy. You have to be able to get code into production quickly and with the utmost confidence in its quality if you’re going to compete against the next digital disrupter being funded even as you’re reading this.

But technology adoption is not driven by operational necessity alone. Political necessity is also often necessary to get the funding and championing required for any significant change of engineering and culture in enterprise IT.

For DevOps, that political necessity is coming in the form of LOB managers who simply don’t want to hear about release dates anymore. The Big Dogs want to make requests when they want to make them—and they want to count on delivery X number of days after that request.

So IT has to get with the DevOps program or risk the bark and the bite of said Big Dogs.

Prediction #3: Digital disasters drive DevOps security/compliance investments

Pundits can pund all they want. Talk and theory don’t usually move entrenched organizations to act. Pain does. So most organizations will only move to more fully integrate automated security testing, data governance policy compliance, etc. into their DevOps pipelines because something bad happens.

And something bad most certainly will happen. Intense production pressures and a hyper-collaborative global community of bad actors are creating a perfect storm of vulnerability that will inevitably result in tough real-world lessons about why security and compliance have to be baked into DevOps. The only question is whether you will learn from your own disasters or someone else’s.

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