2023 Systems Engineering Predictions and Trends

Episode: 106

Air Date: 01/10/2023

Show Notes

2023 Predictions are everywhere. Some are well thought out and some are silly, and some will not look silly for 6 months. I’ve actually gone through most of the major articles over the last few weeks so you don’t have to and I’m going to condense the best of what I’ve seen. Instead of predictions, let’s talk about observations of trends, outlook and outcomes we hope to see. These are my 2023 Predictions For Systems Engineering.

“AI” Will Continue to commands attention – Generative AI is all the rage right now. (ChatGPT, Midjourney, etc)
- Search engine inte#digitalexpergration – Bing
- Images and documents – Canva
- AI or ML – enhanced Analysis Reporting from testing tools?
- AI enhanced Observability for preventative maintenance
- AI enhanced tuning for K8’s and BEYOND (Akamas, StormForge)
- More efficient DevOps – helping reduce toil faster
- Will enable better Low code / No Code solutions as well as “hyper automation” (for things like RPA) – according to Gartner. DevOps will start to embrace this in 2023. The SD Times says Low-code solutions without AI is dead.
Supercloud/Metacloud/Multicloud is coming – Cloud vendors will create an ecosystem of IT stacks (operations, securty, data integration, etc.) to work between hyperscalers. It’s called “cross-cloud abstraction”.
- Resilience / Chaos Engineering (Gremlin/Litmus Chaos/etc)
- Companies are moving their apps and data back to enterprise data centers. Why? The workloads, the resilience, and the cost was not what was expected. High outage rates have not changed significantly. Uptime ‘s 2022 Data Center Resiliency Survey that 80% of data centers have experienced outages in the last 36 months, 10% higher on average than before.
Observability
- This is the year of Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM), which includes everything about Observability as it pertains to the END USER EXPERIENCE.
- Will focus on efficiency and controlling cost
- Reducing data ingestion that isn’t useful (Gartner). edge based infrastructure will be used more for ingesting, filtering, and transforming data before sending to the cloud. Edge server processing for CDN’s and other data will be utilized more and more.
- Power usage – energy efficiency
- Performance will still be important to maintain even under additional restraints. It’s now about getting the most value for the money.
- OpenTelemetry Integration will be a major issue for companies who use multiple Observability vendors. Why? The standards aren’t done (i.e. logs are still in draft). Hat tip to Nick Hedeucker of Cribl on that.
DevOps
- BIZDEVOPS will be a new mainstream methodology – making business context and how technology impacts the business a high priority.
- Platform Engineering will be “a thing” whether you like it or not. DevOps is losing the shine due to failed implementations and Developer burnout. Focusing on the developer experience will be a big deal for 2023 and beyond. The need for well-placed specialization is a factor here. DevOps will always be “a thing” but there is a large amount of technical debt in the wake of the last decade of development. The role of the system administrator is changing as well. All this points to the need for Platform Engineering as defined as something to enable developers to offload some of the administration of environments and focus on code. Also, see Viktor Farcic (DevOps Toolkit) talk about it on his YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_v77YiSGEY
- API’s simulation will be a focus (service virtualization)
- “Everything” – as -code will continue to mature as Kubernetes and container-based applications continue it’s phenomenal growth pattern.
- Web3 – some predict DevOps will finally adopt blockchain and newer programming languages. On this I’m not convinced, and there is still too much smoke and mirrors in this space to be taken seriously in the Enterprise.
Security – the use of AI and ML will enable smarter threats, and worse ransomware attacks. AI against AI would be interesting to see. Cribl predicts the cost will be 10X the cost of all natural disasters combined! Security will be one of the biggest drivers of IT spending.